For days, the New York news media has been reporting that
people are waiting five or more hours to walk through the Museum of Modern
Art’s (MOMA) “Rain Room.”
Rain Room is a dark alley way in which a heavy rain is
coming down except where sensors detect people. People thus get the sensation
of walking between rain drops. Whether or not it’s an aesthetic experience is
open to discussion, as is the parallel question of whether Rain Room is a work
of art. I haven’t been there and I won’t go, but my sense is that the
installation would fit more easily in an amusement park or Universal
Studios. I had a similar feeling about
the Punk fashion exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I did see, but
that was because of the exhibit itself. In the case of MOMA, it is not the curator who has decided
to present artifacts of culture in an amusement park environment, but the
artists who have decided to conjure an amusement park experience and present it
as art.
That “Rain Room” makes an
interesting juxtaposition with a summer exhibit at another New York cultural
mainstay—the James Turrell show at the Guggenheim museum, which is also
generating enormous lines of paying customers. Turrell is a light artist, which
means he makes boxes and other shapes in which all the color is provided by
light. The show includes a retrospective
of light boxes meant to look like Joseph Alber’s paintings, but the center is a
new piece called ”Aten Reign”
that turns the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda into an enormous volume filled with light
that gradually changes color.
Like “Rain Room,” the Turrell pieces
depend more on technology than the individual hand craft of the artist. Mental
skills such as manipulating light, small engines, gears and arrays of
photovoltaic sensors replace the hand skills of applying paint, cutting shapes
or molding clay. The raw materials tend to be pre-fabricated parts.
Of greater relevance is the similarity in
the aesthetic experience between “Rain Room” and the Turrells: Both are
primarily physical experiences, such as you get from a light show or an
amusement park ride. The Turrell may make a much greater claim to being art
because of the allusions to Albers and other artists, unless you consider his
light versions to be similar to stuffed toy versions of the Mona Lisa or neckties
with “Starry Night” printed on them.
The issue of what is or isn’t art has
plagued critics and scholars since recorded history began. Dresses, scepters,
bowls, jewelry boxes and advertisements have all laid claim to art, as have
blank canvases, lumps of material and even jars of the so-called artist’s
stool. At the end of the day, the question, “What is art?,’ can have as many
legitimate answers as the number of people who ask it.
The more interesting question is not
whether Turrell or “Rain Room” is art, but why at the same point of time, two
of the most important museums in the United States have decided to have
exhibits of art based on the amusement park values of physical titillation and
the manipulation of engineering concepts at the same time as a third major
museum in the same city is presenting an exhibit which is itself an amusement
park experience.
When James Ensor and Emil Nolde used
amusement park imagery in their paintings and Fellini and Bergman did so in
their movies, they were reanimating the tradition of their respective art
forms, but the aesthetic pleasure of the painting or movie remained the
same. This current crop of exhibits
takes not the imagery, but the techniques of the amusement park to produce the
aesthetic experience of the amusement park. Entertaining, but probably not art.
But the very fact that one can find the
amusement park experience at a museum probably is contributing to the
popularity of all three shows. People may not want to stand in line to see a
Titian or a Picasso, but they are used to long lines at Disney World.
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