Cai Guo-Qiang Time: Dueling Magazine Profiles; MASS MoCA Snub

Cai Guo-Qiang, “Inopportune: Stage One,” 2004, at MASS MoCA
The Guggenheim’s Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe retrospective doesn’t open until Friday, but already the big guns of art journalism have jumped the gun with major profiles of the gunpowder king—Arthur Lubow in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine and Peter Schjeldahl in next week’s New Yorker (online now).
But there seems to be a news blackout on the fact that the original version of the much discussed centerpiece for the show—a succession of identical automobiles, emanating sparks as they hurtle through the Guggenheim’s rotunda—was created for a wide-ranging 2004-05 exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune at MASS MoCA, North Adams. That first version of the car-bomb piece (above) was later acquired by the Seattle Art Museum for the entrance lobby of its new building.
Even the website of the exhibition’s lead sponsor, the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (where Cai is an “honorary advisor”), snubs MASS MoCA’s pioneering show, while citing the artist’s projects at the Metropolitan Museum and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
The upcoming New York show was “designed,” according to the Guggenheim’s press release “as a site-specific installation.”
So was its uncredited precursor at MASS MoCA.