Tag Archives: MoMA

Critics sharpen knives. Björk gets filleted.

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I’ve read some negative reviews in my time but nothing like what’s raining down on the Björk “mid-career” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, the Björk show at MoMA is bad, really bad.”
Ben Davis
artnet

Yikes!

“…the show reeks of ambivalence.”
Roberta Smith
The New York Times

Ouch. She said it reeks.

“And the dresses, honey, the dresses.”
Jason Farago
The Guardian

I attended a preview and thought the show was okay (just), but after reading some of the scathing critiques, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s as bad as they say it is. They make some astute observations, these critics.

I’ve had a bug up my ass about Björk for years. Occasionally, an artist will say something that’s so insipid and void of perspective that it leaves me with an ambivalence towards their work that won’t fade away. For instance, back in 2010, while one-note actor Michael Cera was promoting Scott Pilgrim vs The World, he delivered this nugget of clarity:

“I don’t really want to be famous, and I’m kind of scared that might be happening.”

Then don’t be a MOVIE STAR or take a lead role in a BROADWAY PLAY, stupid. I could go on with similar examples. (And, in fact, I have.)

In 2000, Björk was promoting Dancer in the Dark, a movie she starred in with Catherine Deneuve for which she received much praise and an Oscar nomination. During a press junket, she said filming was:

“…like signing on to war, going to the Vietnam War. I believed I might die. Acting is like jumping from a cliff without a parachute.”

What an idiot. I’ve done neither, but I’m fairly certain that making a movie is nothing at all like fighting in Vietnam. She lives in a vacuum. I’ve dated girls like Björk. They’re in a constant state of crisis—a crisis that’s usually of their own construct. They’re malcontents who’re always spoiling for a fight and feel the world is against them. After she said that, I lost interest in her work.

Flash forward. I entered the exhibit with an open heart. I resolved to judge her work on its merits and forget about this foolishness from 15 years ago. I had a nice enough time but it’s like the Orlando Hard Rock Café without the overpriced hamburgers. Examples of her hand written lyrics and journals were under glass. Man, I don’t care about her scribblings. And journals? Give me a break. Who wants to read someone’s journals?

Before entering the exhibit, you’re given an iPod and a pair of pretty decent Bang & Olufsen headphones. There’s music and spoken-word narration for each individual gallery. The tracks are triggered by motion detectors. As you move between the small, cramped galleries, the music and narration changes automatically when you cross a threshold. It’s a clever conceit but I soon lost interest and relegated the audio portion to the back of my mind. I couldn’t understand the dialogue over the music. It was only later after reading some reviews I discovered there’s a linear story being told about Björk being on a journey. Who knew?

The galleries contained videos and costumes from her live performances. There was her swan dress from her night at the Oscars (on a cartoonish likeness of her). The eggs are a nice touch.

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A translucent, nipple-pierced Björk was dressed in this Alexander McQueen gown. It slowly rotated on a pedestal.

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The Bell Dress, another McQueen creation, along with headpiece hair sculpture by Hrafnhildur Arnardottir.

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The cool robots from her All Is Full of Love video.

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I’m not entirely certain where these were used. The gallery was packed and I couldn’t get to the description card. But they were interesting. They must have been uncomfortable to wear. If anyone can fill in the blanks, feel free.

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Her videos, arguably the bread and butter of her oeuvre, are relegated to a room with serviceable projection and uncomfortable foam furniture. It’s a shame because the camera loves her. The guy sitting in front of me had horrific B.O. and I had to leave earlier than I would have liked. That’s not Björk’s fault.

She created a new work specifically for this exhibit. It’s a :10 minute film for Black Lake, which appears on her new album. It’s about her breakup with conceptual artist Matthew Barney. You enter a dark, circular room with two large facing screens and sit on the floor. A great sound system cranks up and you see a film of Björk crawling around on her knees in a cave, emoting, beating her chest and singing a song of unrelenting heartache.

Family was always our sacred mutual mission
Which you abandoned

You have nothing to give
Your heart is hollow
I’m drowned in sorrows
No hope in sight of ever recover
Eternal pain and horrors

Oy. What melodrama. Even during my worst break-ups I never thought the pain and horror was eternal. I would never commit thoughts like that to paper. They say artists “feel” more. Maybe that’s true.

This is the 7th anniversary of my blog. Here’s to another seven years *ting*.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Did Shakespeare maintain a blog? Sure sounds like it.

Hating Contemporary Art (Thanks for Nothing, MoMA)

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Sitting through a boring movie doesn’t mean you’ll never watch another movie again. Hearing a tedious piece of music won’t ruin music for you. A dull comedian won’t prevent you from laughing next week. But one insufferable play can keep you from ever wanting to go to the theater again. Likewise, one banal art exhibit can scar you for life. Do you find that to be so?

I had a big laugh last May when this sink by “artist” Robert Gober sold at a Christie’s contemporary art auction for $4,197,000.

sinkI’d never heard of this guy and thought the piece suffered from naked-emperor syndrome. This is the type of junk that alienates people from contemporary art. It’s a $4.2M joke played on the buyer. I’d forgotten all about the damn thing until I walked into the Museum of Modern Art and saw a career retrospective of Gober’s work.

I did a quick breath meditation and cleared my mind of all preconceived notions and previous judgments. I went in fresh. A white, blank slate.

I found the work so pretentious and uninspiring that I’m angry that my time was wasted. I’m getting all worked up again typing this. I want to take the MoMA curators and shake them. What do they see in this crap? C’mon down to the famous art museum and pay $25 to see a leg sticking out of a wall.

gorberleg2Or a leg sticking out of the wall with an anchor hanging from it.

gorberleg1Or a realistic, anatomically detailed, paraffin torso…

gorberleg3…with a music score written across his ass. What is this? It’s NOTHING.

gorberleg4I don’t get it. I don’t want to get it. I don’t want to be one of those precious deep thinkers who find metaphorical mystery in bundles of newspapers stacked in a corner. I guffawed at this because I’ve got the exact same installation in my garage.

gorbernewsRemember the $4 million sink? You want more? We got more! We got sinks with running water.

gorbersink2 Sinks filling a room. (With bundles of newspaper. Fancy. Introspective.)

gorbersink3Giant sinks. Sinks within sinks.

gorbersink1Apparently, he went through a wallpaper phase. Here, we have a room covered with images of penises and vaginas. Aren’t you shocked?! Tee-hee. I guess I can’t bring the kiddies to this one.

gorberwall3The next room was covered with wallpaper containing images of a lynching while whitey-white man sleeps peacefully. Ooh. I feel so guilty.

gorberwallpaperThe perimeter of the room is ringed with bags of cat litter for NO APPARENT REASON.

gorberwall1This was the one piece I liked. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. A suitcase sits on the gallery floor.

gorbercase1Look inside and you’ll find a sewer grate.

gorbercase2Below the grate you’ll see that they’ve actually cut a hole in the gallery floor. A tabloid scene is below. The feet of a man standing in a pond holding a child. It’s a big surprise and the only thing I saw that showed a modicum of imagination.

gober suitcase 2I don’t need pretty pictures. Heaven knows those Francis Bacon smears are fairly horrific but I enjoy them. And I like pop art. It’s simple but fun. This stuff has no admirable qualities that I can detect. I am astonished at its popularity. MoMA owes me one free admission, those bastards.

Suppose someone is new to the art world and wants to expand their horizons. They walk into MoMA and see this crap. What are the odds that person will ever bother with art again? Especially contemporary art? On the other hand, they laughed at Degas for painting dancers who were tying their shoes and reading newspapers instead of dancing. What do I know?

Step aside, junior, and let some contemporary artists with vision and a fertile imagination

show you

how it’s done.

As always, feel free to disagree.

A forgotten doorway to my past

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binLong-time readers know what these are. For the benefit of new readers, [I have new readers! Thank you, WordPress migration.] this is a storage bin  filled with journals from when I first moved to New York as a young, scared, lonely boy. There are hundreds and hundreds of single-spaced typewritten pages and many books filled with shaky, unsure handwriting. I had completely forgotten about them for many years but they resurfaced not long ago. I occasionally crack one open and post an entry. I offer these without edits and with the caveat that I was an emotionally immature, crude and not very nice person. Especially to women. But I’ve since learned a thing or two and I have forgiven my trespasses. I hope you do the same. I am in a constant struggle with whether or not I should destroy these. I don’t want any of the ladies in my life to read them.

When we last saw our hero, he was in the throes of a crisis of his own making (as they almost always were). An extraordinary woman he was seeing, Bonnie, had given him his walking papers. He had spouted off at length about how the work of avant garde artist John Cage was dull, unimportant, lacking structure and, worst of all, pretentious. Unbeknownst to him at the time, Bonnie, an older sophisticated architect, wrote her thesis at Yale on the career of John Cage.

~~~~~~~~~~

August 30, 1992

In an effort to better educate myself and repair the damage I wrought with Bonnie, I invited her to a concert of John Cage’s work at MoMA. Bonnie asked if I was paying penance and I said, of course I was, so she agreed to go. The concert was just awful. Honestly, it only confirmed my suspicions but I’ll never admit that to Bonnie. I still want to sleep with her.

They had a lot of nerve calling it a concert. It had very little to do with music. The opening and closing numbers used traditional instruments—violin, viola, flute and a few others. They would each take a turn playing a long, sustained note. They’d occasionally overlap for texture but it was little more than a drone. The middle piece was three guys standing in front of a microphone crumbling and then un-crumbling pieces of newspaper and then slowly ripping them into long strips. This was accompanied by a man tapping a plastic plate, a woman pouring water and someone tapping two plastic tubes together. We heard some people in the back laughing, so I know I’m not alone in my mystification. There was a beautiful Steinway grand piano on stage but the only sound that came out of it was some guy occasionally plucking a string or slapping the wood. I listened with all sincerity but all I heard was someone ripping newspaper and beating up some poor piano. It didn’t mean anything to me. At the conclusion, the audience erupted with wild applause. I don’t get it. But I think I might be back in her good graces, so that’s good news. (Note: It didn’t work. Things were never the same again.)

September 1

I just got off the phone with Bonnie. Apparently, it’s not enough that her business is failing and she’s teetering on bankruptcy and might lose that spectacular apartment. She said, “Mark, I had blood coming out of my rectum. I thought it was just a simple hemorrhoid but I went to a doctor and he’s sending me to have tests done.” She’s at Cornell Medical Center as I type this. I told her I’d accompany her back home but I’m being spared that horror, thank heavens. I feel awful for her but it’s disgusting to hear about it in such graphic detail. I’m completely turned off. She said I could stop by later today but I’m wondering if she’ll be too out of it to receive guests.

Bonnie is sick. Joan only wants me to look at an apartment in Chelsea that I can’t afford. Klinger is in Miami. Colleen wants to see me, but I think she’s getting the wrong ideas. Cindy is in Arizona. I haven’t heard from Jennifer. I can only see Laura if I pay for everything and I’m broke. That leaves a city full of strangers. And my cats.

September 2

Bonnie got back from the hospital late last night and sounded awful so I didn’t visit. She’s going to be okay, thank God. Hemorrhoids. What the fuck is a hemorrhoid, anyway? Remind me to look it up later. Her doctor thought it might be colon cancer. They knocked her out with nitrous oxide, lucky duck. I’ll bet they didn’t have go to the Key Foods and empty all the Reddi-wip canisters, like I have to. I’m happy she’s okay but all I can picture is blood flowing out of her ass. I don’t think I can sleep with her again. Maybe if she goes down on me I’ll be okay. We’ll see.

~~~~~~~~~~

Quite the charmer, wasn’t I? I’ve created a new category for my other journal entries, but THIS ONE is the best of the bunch so far. It’s amazing how you walk around thinking nothing is happening when the truth is you’re having the time of your life.

~~~~~~~~~~

Another big blankey of snow this week. No surprise there. On Tuesday, I heard Irish author Roddy Doyle read from his new novel (and got a signed first edition, OF COURSE). He said the Irish winter he left behind was typically cold, wet and gray. He’s absolutely thrilled with the snow. Wait until he tries to fly out. See how much he likes it then. Here are some shots of Central Park. See…it ain’t all bad.

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Autumn for Sale

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I work in an office tower on 6th Avenue in the middle of Manhattan. As you might expect, there aren’t many residential buildings nearby. It’s almost exclusively pencil-pushing, paper-shuffling edifices. Other neighborhoods—Chelsea, the Upper East and West Sides, the Villages—are more resident-oriented. But that’s not to say there aren’t ANY residential buildings in Midtown.

Directly across the street from my office is an apartment building. Architecturally, it’s a quiet affair; not at all like the soulless glass and steel structures that surround it. Its facade is brick with some flourishes.

terrace1

Central Park, which is on fire right now with autumnal splendor, is just three short blocks away. Aside from immediately after a gigantic snowstorm, fall is when the city is at its most pastoral and beautiful. People come from all over the world to stroll through Central Park in the fall. These fortunate few, these denizens of the better addresses, can simply walk out their door, turn left, and in a matter of minutes be enveloped in Manhattan’s rustic beauty.

But sometimes, you don’t want to make that three-block walk. It may be too early in the morning. You might not look your best. In that case, you take your coffee and your iPad and sit outside on your sun-drenched terrace.

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And that’s no reason to miss out on the splendor of autumn. You can always spend a small fortune to have a landscaper haul autumn up the service elevator and reconstruct it right outside your terrace door.

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*     *     *

Within a 48-hour period last week:

  • At a jewelry auction in Geneva, the Pink Star diamond fetched $83,000,000, a record price for a gemstone. At the conclusion of the auction, the auction house played The Theme from the Pink Panther by Henry Mancini. Get it?
  • Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud sold for $142,000,000 at Christie’s, the most ever paid for a work of art. Wild applause broke out after six minutes of frantic bidding.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both achieved record highs.

Those first two points are intrinsically linked to the third. I wonder what it’s like to inhabit that ionosphere? Do you think they’re aware of the rare air they breath? Do they possess the proper depth of appreciation for their circumstances or are they blissfully blasé about it? I’d like to be blissfully blasé.

I’ve entered the prices realized from last week’s Post-War Modern Art auction at Christie’s (scroll down). It was a phenomenally successful event. The results far exceeded their wildest, sugarplums-dancing dreams. I read an excellent commentary on how it was difficult to actually see the art through all the dollar signs. The author found the auction…

“…painful to watch yet impossible to ignore and deeply alienating if you actually love art for its own sake.”

 *     *     *

Here’s an interesting little doodad by Camille Norment that was on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art recently.

lamp1

Triplight. 2008

It’s an old-timey Shure microphone—the kind that Sinatra and Billie Holiday used—with the guts replaced by a small, slowly pulsating light.

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The shadow cast is supposed to be a “luminescent rib cage” that calls to mind the absent performer; the pulsating light reminiscent of breathing. Well, I don’t know about all that but it was mesmerizing to look at.

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Museum of Modern Art, Wednesday, October 30, 12:55 p.m.