Installation shot of the Guggenheim Museum’s “Chaos and Classicism” show
Holland Cotter, in today’s NY Times finds the Guggenheim’s current exhibition, Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918-1936, to be “totally engrossing” (as did I, in my much-Twittered CultureGrrl review, published Friday). But he doesn’t think that you’ll react as he did.
Cotter writes:
With its high percentage of unfamiliar names, the exhibition won’t pull
crowds. Visitors with a stake in art-as-uplift will find the story it
tells mystifying, if not perverse.
I find his stab at attendance-prediction “mystifying , if not perverse.” My guess is that Cotter has made himself a liar, by publishing the kind of thoughtful, admiring review that will indeed “pull crowds.”
But apparently this little-reviewed exhibition is doing just fine, even without a push from heavyweight pundits. According to an e-mail just sent to me by the show’s guest curator, Kenneth Silver, the show is “already VERY VERY crowded, and the PUBLIC (!!!) seems to love it.” (Exclamation points are his, not mine.)
Maybe reviewers and some curators (but not scholars like NYU Professor Silver) underestimate the intelligence of the museum-going public, not to mention its thirst for something fresh, thought-provoking and un-formulaic for a change.
While my “portentous tour de force” description of the show has gained currency among the Twitterati, Cotter has penned the perfect characterization for this worthy project—“a survey-style piece of investigative history with a bomb ticking away inside.”