What energy I have today so far has been spent in posting comments here and elsewhere and moving boxes of various kinds around pointlessly. Since the day is moving on, let me recommend two items that came to my attention via trackbacks here: Art Digest Daily (a site new to me) has more on Damien Hirst in Boston. I'm chagrined to see that I skipped over the New York Times calling Hirst "a third-rate Warhol, a second-rate Koons" - very enjoyable.
Not interested in flies and formaldehyde? Have your mind set on how life, suffering, and death appeared in a different age, at the hand of a very much greater artist? And how a museum could botch the presentation of the same so badly? Consider this review of Caravaggio: The Last Years, currently at London's National Gallery. This excerpt, on the installation, offers that timeless dilemma, to laugh or to cry:
What we see isn't Caravaggio's light — it's the gallery's light, and pretty darned strange it is, too. Somewhere along the planning process for the show, someone obviously decided that it would be a really good idea to keep the exhibition space extremely dark — dark walls, in oxblood and slate, as well as a generalised absence of illumination — while at the same time training spotlights on the paintings themselves. The result? As might have been predicted, this arrangement (more familiar from, say, the London Dungeon than the more upmarket reaches of the tourism spectrum) has the effect of making the usual unremarkable crowd of massed cultural consumers look marginally more like figures from Caravaggio's canvases — while making the canvases themselves almost unreadable.
The raking light tells us a great deal about the glaze layers and the overall condition of the upper few inches of the larger works, bleeds all the colour out of the centre of the work and inflicts strange patches of glare everywhere else. The larger paintings are simply impossible to see in their entirety. Did no one notice this before the exhibition began? Did no other critic notice it? The literal-mindedness behind this decision might be vaguely endearing had the show been organised by a team of enthusiastic six-formers. Coming from the curators at one of the world's greatest art institutions, though, it is nothing short of scary. What next? Insisting that viewers can only enjoy Bruegel's riotous kermesse scenes after consuming four or five pints? Refusing to show Turner canvases anywhere except outside, preferably in a thick fog? Making everyone strip off on their way into a Lucian Freud retrospective? Demand that only horses can see the forthcoming Stubbs show?
Well, the four or five pints sounds good.
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