In fact, Barney takes himself awfully seriously, without a clear narrative or visual center, and his outsize ego seemingly feeds his own stardom. Besides, if an artist has to take himself this seriously, he may as well chase the great white whale. One could easily treat those expanding walls as a work by Richard Serra softened by a little petroleum jelly. The white plastic sculpture shows a whale hunt disintegrating before one's eyes, with rope spooling out across rooms and a ship's hull breached by its very contents. It derives from his video collaboration with his wife, Bjork, but not simply as a fire sale on the props. The 2006 sculpture may even stand as his best work, starting with a scale that gives it a life after video of its own. When defenders use words like grandiose, hermetic, and self-involved as compliments, I start to distrust it much more. His 2006 show-which filled Barbara Gladstone's plush, meandering space to the brim-disappointed many fans, but I see it as a piece with his career. His Cremaster Cycle might even throw in the kitchen sink at some point for all I know. But then with Barney so much meets the eye. Matthew Barney really does mean less than meets the eye. Stepping back from the gorgeous wall display, one could well be watching it dissolve into a magazine spread.Īnother media darling loves to pose for the camera, and it has led to videos of truly epic proportions. Still, when Elizabeth Peyton in short hair leans over her cigarette beneath striated film noir shadows, one has met an LA artist into stardom. None has the polished look of an actor's promotional stills, as in work by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders or David Robbins. Haim Steinbach poses as a weary space alien, undisturbed by two almost identical girls standing on his sofa as if floating on air. John Cage has his chess set and calm intelligence, both in a tradition going back to Duchamp. Sometimes her props refer to an artist's work or personal life. Yet even a beautiful, focused set of artist portraits raises questions about commerce and culture in an overhyped gallery scene. Her shadows give interiors an allusive, cinematic space that Cindy Sherman might envy. Her portraits celebrate established and emerging artists from the last ten years, and she seems always to have found her subjects and their pose before the major magazines did. I mean a photographer's ability to set a scene, but also a nose for talent and celebrity, somewhere between a gossip columnist and a critic. Lina Bertucci has not just an eye, but a nose, too. A related article looks at Barney's earlier videos, a performance that made Hollywood seem modest by comparison. Yet her drawings, like Barney's, struggle against the sublime, too. And when Fioroni turns to happenings, they have a silvery chic as well. This is the institution turning in 2013 directly from Marcel Proust to "The Eucharist in Medieval Life and Art." Maybe something of the Eucharist survives in its drawings by Barney, titled "Subliming Vessel," as if they contained a god's blood. The Morgan Library does not come lightly to contemporary art, much less to Hollywood. Like Matthew Barney and Giosetta Fioroni, she sees art as about shooting stars, not excluding themselves. In New York City Lina Bertucci, Matthew Barney, and Giosetta Fioroniĭoes art still have a little fight left in it, beyond big business and mass entertainment? It may have to struggle first with chic images of contemporary artists, thanks to Lina Bertucci.
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