So I made it yesterday to the MFA, to see among other things the Ralph Lauren car exhibit. The place was crowded, and the museum’s apparent plan to bring in straight men by focusing on everything but art seems to be working. It was definitely packed enough to require counter-clockwise viewing. I’d complained about the idea of the exhibit before, but the exhibit was lousier than I expected.
There was the sheer stupidity of the set up. A car-show look of low daises with illuminated panels containing item descriptions probably looks great in an empty display hall, but with crowds three-layers thick you can’t read anything through people’s legs. Then there was the paucity of the curation itself: wall introductions were restricted to biography and company history; item descriptions focused on horsepower and vehicle identification numbers to the detriment of anything else; oddly placed video projectors showed dull road demonstrations making Audi commercials look like the quintessence of excitement. No pictures, no historical materials, no cars besides Mr. Lauren’s hot rods. Most importantly, there was no real consideration of what car design is, what it means to put it in a fine arts museum, what part of “design” refers to engineering or what the relation between sheer luxury and good design is. Leather interiors are nifty to look at, but are they ipso facto superior in form to mass market vehicles? Exhibitions aren’t academic papers (except at the ICA!) and won’t go about answering these questions in an expository fashion, but given that the whole gambit and anti-elitist pose justifying opening a fine arts museum to such a shameless marketing tie-in in the first place was a simple claim that museums unfairly exclude design of automobiles, these questions deserved consideration.
Fortunately, downstairs, the Contemporary Prints show was just fantastic. Some representational work (which was ho-hum in this case), some conceptual art (the instances here I really liked), but mostly the exhibit slanted toward abstraction. The standouts, in my eye, and in that of the friend I went with, were the series of prints by Brice Marden and Sol LeWitt. The first works with blacks and greys in increasing intensity of texture, line and pattern , while the latter constructs unexpected color and pattern from overlapping silkscreen colored lines. But don’t rely on my descriptions; the exhibit alone is worth a trip to the museum and delivers both on quantity and quality. It’s larger than the normal small space they devote to contemporary work, and a good 85 percent on display is stellar.
There’s probably not much to say about the thoroughly underwhelming the Damian Hirst exhibit other than to note Modern Kick’s excellent review of the show. Adding to his critique of the curation, I’ll add that coming from the vantage of a narrative art, I bristle when curatorial discourse praises art work for merely having themes, as if the presence of thematic ideas attests at all to how those themes are expressed through a work.
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