Reviews

Andy Warhol famously instructed an interviewer to “just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” But it’s been a long time since the pioneering Pop artist has been seen simply as an empty cipher.  In the years since his death in 1987 Warhol has been reborn many times. The ever-multiplying Andys include social critic Andy, queer Andy, proto-postmodern Andy, reality TV Andy, and commercial Andy.
“Andy Warhol: Revelation,” currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, homes in on Catholic Andy. Originally organized for the Warhol Museum by its chief curator José Carlos Diaz and overseen in its Brooklyn incarnation Carmen Hermo, the exhibition draws a line from Warhol’s religious upbringing as a Byzantine Catholic (he later took up Roman Catholicism) through the twists and turns of his career to his last major undertaking, a set of over 100 paintings based on Leonardo’s Last Supper.
This is touted as the first exhibition to explore this aspect of Warhol’s work. However, it is not exactly a new take—the catalogue references both art historian John Richardson’s paean to Warhol’s “secret piety” in his 1987 eulogy and Jane Daggett Dillenberger’s 1998 tome The Religious Art of Andy Warhol. I will modestly add here the chapter I devoted to Warhol’s Catholicism in my 2004 book Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art. Another precursor is Arthur Danto, whose ideas about the transfiguration of the commonplace hover without attribution in labels that discuss Warhol’s sculptures of Heinz Ketchup and Delmonte Peaches boxes.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
But if the idea of a Warhol immersed in spiritual concerns has been around for some time, newly unearthed materials from the archives of the Warhol Museum have deepened the case. Discoveries include an unfinished film that would have been funded by the Catholic Church, a never completed series of images of nursing mothers, a set of drawings of angels by Warhol’s mother Julia Warhola, as well as religious objects, letters, and clippings that give context to the snippets of text and found images that appear in Warhol’s paintings.
In addition, the show leans heavily on recent scholarship by Warhol Museum curator Jessica Beck that places Warhol’s late Last Supper paintings in the context of his terrified response to the concurrent AIDS Epidemic. These materials, combined with revelations first made by Richardson of Warhol’s regular church attendance, his financial support of a nephew’s studies for the priesthood, and his participation in a soup kitchen provide a picture of Warhol much at odds with more familiar representations of the artist as an indifferent societal mirror or cultural sieve.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
The show opens with a wealth of materials that underscore the degree to which religion saturated Warhol’s childhood. On display are holy cards, religious statuettes, and crucifixes from his home, several religious paintings borrowed from his childhood church, and even a painting by a very young Warhol in which his childhood living room is presided over by a prominent cross.
The show then builds its case with thematic sections that consider other aspects of Warhol’s debt to Catholicism. One set of works and ephemera consider his rather problematic relationship with women. These include his obsession with Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy, whose portraits have long been seen as counterparts to the Byzantine icons of his childhood; his friendship with Candy Darling, Warhol superstar and transgender icon; and his near assassination by Valerie Solanas, the Factory hanger-on and author of the SCUM Manifesto (a piquant acronym for the Society for Cutting up Men). More surprising are drawings and photographs depicting breastfeeding mothers. Inspired, presumably, by the countless Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child, these were intended for a never realized painting series.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Another section documents Warhol’s 1980 visit to the Vatican and his five-second meeting with Pope John Paul II amid a throng of other worshipers. The exhibition ties this to a number of Warhol drawings of huge crowd scenes. A section documenting his borrowings from various Renaissance paintings (and pointing toward the late Last Supper paintings) tries to make the case for Warhol as a latter-day Renaissance man. A section of an unfinished film originally destined for a 1968 World’s Fair in San Antonio is comprised of poetic images of the setting sun accompanied by a crooning voiceover by Factory chanteuse Nico. Commissioned by the Catholic Church, it bears a striking resemblance to Paul Pfeiffer’s 2001 film Study for Morning after the Deluge, in which the rising and setting sun also becomes a metaphor for the cycle of life and death.
But most crucial for the exhibition’s argument is a section titled “The Catholic Body.” Here the show ties the essential carnality of Catholicism, a religion whose doctrines, art, and literature center on very literal representations of the “Word Made Flesh,” to Warhol’s bodily obsessions and his conflicted existence as a gay man in a faith that condemns homosexuality.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Two works introduce these ideas. Richard Avedon’s iconic photograph of Warhol’s bared torso riven with the scars left by Solanas’s attack becomes, in this context, a modern-day version of the many Renaissance representations of the martyr Saint Sebastian, whose muscular arrow riddled torso has made him a gay icon. A lesser known Warhol silkscreen painting from 1985-86 titled The Last Supper (Be a Somebody with a Body) also presents a juxtaposition of religious and homoerotic imagery, this time by layering images of the Christ from the Last Supper and an image, clipped from a newspaper ad, of a buff, half-dressed body builder.
Which brings us to the exhibition’s centerpiece. “Andy Warhol: Revelation” pivots on Warhol’s Last Supper paintings. Arranged like a horseshoe, the layout leads one through the above-mentioned material to a voluminous quantity of Last Supper imagery. The Last Supper paintings were commissioned in 1984 by art dealer Alexander Iolas for display in a space in Milan across the street from Leonardo’s masterwork. But Warhol went far beyond the confines of the original commission. He collected multiple images of the Last Supper, including a lenticular version and a very kitschy sculptural rendition documented here in polaroid photographs. And he used the imagery in many ways, including on a series of punching bags that were collaborations with Jean Michel Basquiat and in paintings emblazoned with logos or comprised of fragments of Leonardo’s mural.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
At the Brooklyn Museum, two full-scale versions of Warhol’s Last Supper are presented in an almost chapel-like space. They spread over opposite walls separated by a bench where, on the day I visited, visitors were obediently sitting in contemplative silence.  This is a reminder of the ambiguity embedded in this work—and for that matter, all of Warhol’s work. Depending on which Andy they are highlighting, critics have tended to locate Warhol’s imagery on a scale that runs from blank irony to heartfelt sincerity. The Last Supper paintings pose a particular problem. Are they just another pop culture image, not unlike the like soup cans, dollar signs, or portraits of Chairman Mao, appropriated precisely because of their ubiquity and banality? Or are they vessels full of personal meaning? In an essay referenced in the catalogue, Jessica Beck makes the case for the latter, arguing that these late paintings were created in an atmosphere suffused with the threat of AIDS.  Many of Warhol’s friends and associates were dying of the disease. In response, Beck maintains that Warhol “gave AIDS a face—the mournful face of Christ.”
And yet, as the exhibition now moves down the other prong of the horseshoe layout, closing the show out with works that provide a Catholic context for some of Warhol’s more familiar imagery, one can’t help feeling that interpretation is a little too pat. The exhibition consciously resists the tendency, evident both in the Richardson eulogy and the Dillenberger study, to present an overly sanctified Warhol free of the bedeviling contradictions that continue to make him such an elusive subject. But at the same time the approach here seems overly hermeneutic.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
By that I mean that texts and images are treated like hidden messages to be deciphered as one might the theological exegeses embedded in Renaissance religious paintings or medieval manuscripts. Such an approach seems to dismiss the deliberate insouciance of Warhol’s own commentaries as well as the obvious ironies that underlie so many works. And it makes it necessary, to use just one example, to reframe the overtly blasphemous and sacrilegious references in Warhol’s film Chelsea Girls, screened in full here, as modernizations of Christ’s embrace of outcasts and misfits.
It seems more true to the Last Supper paintings to acknowledge that they exist, like all Warhol’s works, in a continuum between irony and sincerity, partaking simultaneously of both. Warhol could be both vulnerable and cruel, spiritual and profane. Perhaps it might have helped to delve a bit more into the contradictions between the carnal and the spiritual inherent in Catholicism itself. The section “The Catholic Body” starts to do this, but doesn’t touch on the homoerotic overtones of Catholic stories and imagery that would have fired Warhol’s imagination. This is, after all, a religion whose central image is a near naked man on a cross.
Warhol was not alone in finding the mix of ritual, sensuality, and homoeroticism in Catholicism irresistible, even as its official dogma condemned his sexual being. Robert Mapplethorpe, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Wojnorowicz are three gay artists whose work is increasingly being considered in terms of their Catholic upbringing. Of particular relevance to this exhibition is the way that Wojnarowicz used the face and body of the crucified Christ to denote suffering and to evoke society’s callous disregard for the ravages of AIDS while also roundly condemning the Catholic Church’s complicity in the crisis.
Installation view for “Andy Warhol: Revelation, at the Brooklyn Museum, November 19, 2021-June 19, 2022. (Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum. Artworks by Andy Warhol © 2021 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. /Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Moving on from the Last Supper sanctuary, the show winds down with sections that bring us some of the more familiar aspects of Warhol’s work. In light of what has gone before, these now also take on a Catholic tinge. The “Skulls,” “Shadows,” “Electric Chairs,” and “Death and Disasters” evoke Warhol’s death obsession. A section titled “The Material World: What We Worship” offers a nod to his valorization of consumption, now seeing Warhol as the chronicler of “the desires, hopes, and prayers of modern life.” One series, “Guns, Knives, and Crosses” from 1981-81, makes a particularly ambiguous statement about the relationship of religiosity and violence.
 Whatever its shortcomings, this is a thought-provoking and deeply researched show. And, given the way it foregrounds the tension between Warhol’s homosexuality and his Catholic faith, it must be added that it is also a brave one. These days it is easy to raise the censorious hackles of cultural arbiters from both ends of the political spectrum. By presenting a frank acknowledgement of the complexities of sexuality and faith, Andy Warhol: Revelation opens up new avenues in the often fraught discussion of the relation of art and religion.
“Andy Warhol: Revelation” is on view at the Brooklyn Museum, through June 19, 2022.
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There may be no better preparation for the looming corporatized “metaverse” than the current slew of immersive art shows. You can meld with the paintings of Van Gogh or Monet as they are projected at gargantuan scale over the walls and floors of enormous galleries. You can see yourself splintered hundreds of times in the ever-proliferating versions of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity rooms. Or you can visit the Laurie Anderson exhibition currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum. 
Not exactly a retrospective, “The Weather” is a reminder that Anderson has been at the immersive trade for a very long time. Her multimedia extravaganzas incorporate poetry, music, film, visual projections and dance to enfold audiences in waves of light, color, sound, and words. At its best, Anderson’s work interweaves sensory and mental information to open new avenues of thought. 
Since the surprise success of the single “O Superman” off her 1981 debut album Big Science, she has pioneered a unique take on performance that is at once intimate and communal, microscopically focused on the ironic detail and expansively exploding to conjure a sense of cosmic unity. 
The open-ended nature of her narratives is a central part of their appeal. Anderson provides a mélange of real or imagined memories, snippets of oddball news reports, offbeat descriptions of quotidian experiences, clever wordplay, and clichés repeated so many times they become newly strange, all tied together by her sonorous voice and hypnotic electronic music.
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
Presenting her oeuvre in a gallery setting is an almost impossible task, so Anderson and curators Marina Isgro and Jaya Kaveeshwar have opted instead to present a series of installations that follow some of her persistent themes. To make her multimedia practice suitable for gallery viewing, they have accentuated the visual. 
Words—one of Anderson’s essential tools—are splashed over the walls in hand-written scrawls, shredded and rewoven in literal heaps of paper or plastered as long, printed texts on the walls of the gallery. Sound is another integral part of the exhibition, but often it comes second, taking the form of a soothing bath of words and music that operate as the exhibition’s soundtrack. 
Anderson had hoped to include several VR works but was thwarted by Covid restrictions that prohibit the sharing of equipment. Instead, she transformed a 2017 VR work titled Chalkroom, created in collaboration with Taiwanese artist Hsin-Chien Huang, into a mesmerizing environmental installation that is the centerpiece of the Hirshhorn’s show. 
Laurie Anderson and Hsin-Chien Huang, Chalkroom (2017).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
One enters through a doorway swept with moving projections of graffitied words and images that quite effectively mimic the sensation of moving through VR space. Inside, more images and words are scribbled in white paint on the black walls and floor. Unlike the projections, they are fixed in place, but the streams and eddies of white marks become almost as destabilizing as the moving images. 
Reportedly, Anderson spent several weeks alone inside this room painting the texts and images herself. One on hand, they might be seen as a transliteration of the random thoughts and pictures snaking through her mind. But they also suggest the porous nature of the boundary between any internal consciousness and external stimuli. 
Laurie Anderson, The Witness Protection Program (The Raven) (2020).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
The writing that spills over drawings of figures, landscapes, and objects has a stream-of-consciousness quality. It ruminates on the nature of death and dying: “They say you die three times. First when your heart stops. Second when they put you in the ground. Third, the last time someone says your name.” They present sardonic suggestions: “Once you’ve gotten the message, hang up the phone.” They ask questions: “What is the purpose of panic?” or “Who owns the moon?” And they quote figures like John Cage, Charles Dickens, the Beatles, Sigmund Freud, and the 13th-century Zen master Dogen. 
Anchoring the swirling currents of words and images are three large sculptures created for this exhibition. A huge, black raven hunches ominously—a tribute both to the foreboding creature in Edgar Allen Poe’s eponymous poem and a Biblical reference to the bird sent out from the ark by Noah to look for life, never to return. 
Laurie Anderson, To Carry Heart’s Tide (The Canoe) (2020).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
A leaky and partially patched life-size gold canoe has been tasked, according to its title, To Carry the Heart’s Tide. A large green parrot with a moving beak clings to a metal perch. It is the source of a long eclectic monologue on the nature of things. Recited in a tinny electronic voice, its disjointed commentary converges at times with the written texts on the floor below. 
A final sculpture is affixed to one wall. Titled What Time Can Do, it comprises a wooden shelf containing a lineup of various cups and vessels that shakes periodically as if from a passing train. It offers an illustration of a little parable, scrawled on the wall below, that describes the inevitable replacement of beautiful things with their most banal substitutes. 
Laurie Anderson, What Time Can Do (Shaking Shelf) (2021).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Photo by Ron Blunt.
None of the other works in the show have the razzle-dazzle of the Chalkroom. Nevertheless, there is plenty of food for thought. In a poignant story printed on one wall, a narrator (perhaps Anderson, perhaps not) recounts the sudden return of a lost memory of the constant presence of death in an ICU, where she spent several weeks as a child. 
A row of tiny clay figures on which videos of real people have been projected create an enigmatic symphony as they wordlessly rub knives against a sharpening rod. A long bed of paper shredded from a copy of Crime and Punishment becomes the screen for flickering video clips of uncertain origin. A book contains Anderson’s version of the Bible created by a supercomputer that has mixed the sacred text with Anderson’s own writings. Darkly apocalyptic, it is full of vivid phrases and images that almost begin to cohere into a cogent text. 
Laurie Anderson, Habeas Corpus (2015).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
A sense of unease and anxiety permeates the show. This becomes overtly political in two works that reflect on one of this century’s darkest chapters. Habeas Corpus is a reinstallation of a 2015 work, originally created for the Park Avenue Armory, about Mohammed el Gharani, the youngest of the detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Fourteen years old at the time of his capture, he spent seven years in captivity before he was finally released for lack of evidence. He remains haunted by memories of his incarceration and dogged by shadowy agents of various countries. 
Because el Gharani is barred from entering the U.S., Anderson has him speaking about his ordeal through a projected image of him sitting in an armchair. In a particularly poignant moment, he recounts his visit to a slavery museum, where he recognized the essence of his experience in the shackles and cells on display. 
Laurie Anderson, From the Air (2009).
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt. Clay fabrication by Maria Dusamp.
A second work, From the Air (2009), provides the flip side to this tale of fear and insecurity. In a video projected over tiny clay figures of Anderson and her dog, she turns the tale of her beloved pet’s fearful reaction to a vulture attack into a parable about America’s heightened sense of vulnerability in the wake of the September 11 attacks.  
While “The Weather” is billed as a non-retrospective, it doesn’t fully abandon the conventions of that format. There are posters and ephemera from various earlier projects, a selection of the rejiggered instruments Anderson has used over the years, and a set of video excerpts from selected performances from 1975 to 2018.  Also included are a group of oil paintings that will evidently serve as backdrops for an upcoming performance. While competent expressionist abstractions in their own right, they seem out of place in this otherwise technology-driven show. 
Installation view from “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Ron Blunt.
More interesting are a group of staged photographs documenting a very early performance project. For the Institutional Dream Series, created 1972-73, Anderson had a friend photograph her as she attempted to sleep in various public places. Her stated purpose was to discover if location colors the nature of one’s dreams. But the project, with its images of Anderson curled up in such sites as public restrooms, a park bench and a beach, speaks to the origins of feminist performance art in the 1970s.  
As exemplified by artists like Marina Abramovic, Ana Mendieta, and Valie Export, that style of performance encouraged interactivity and emphasized the physicality and vulnerability of the female body in a patriarchal society. Institutional Dream Series shares this sensibility, but Anderson would soon diverge from that kind of self-exposure. Instead, her work presents the body as an extension of ever more advanced technologies, as she experiments with synthesizers, Artificial Intelligence, and VR. Even when she performs on stage, her body seems a small thing, overtaken by an electronically enhanced voice that wants to flood the world.
Laurie Anderson, My Day Beats Your Year (The Parrot) (2010/2021) on view in “Laurie Anderson: The Weather” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Photo by Jason Stern.
All of which makes her the perfect artist for our immersive moment. Anderson speaks to an existence in which the physical body is merely a portal to other digital realities and identity is a construct made up, as Roland Barthes would say, of a tissue of signs and quotations from other centers of culture. Even in a museum setting where viewers go in person to interact with actual artworks, Anderson manages to evoke this brave new world where the corporeal is dissolving into the virtual. 
Yet, despite the fact that “The Weather” celebrates a career that has relentlessly pursued the most advanced forms of electronic communication, ultimately Anderson seems to be presenting a cautionary tale. The marriage of real and virtual consciousness doesn’t seem to have made us any better or any smarter. Instead, Anderson has her nattering Parrot mutter: “They say that if you think technology can solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology and you don’t understand your problems.”
“Laurie Anderson: The Weather”, is on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., through July 31, 2022. 
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I’m a bit split about “Fragile Future,” the slick collection of installations by Amsterdam-based experience-art duo Drift (a.k.a. Lonneke Gordijn, Ralph Nauta, and their “multidisciplinary team” of helpers), currently at the Shed.
In terms of what you see and experience, the show is fun. If you like Christmas light shows or Las Vegas magic acts—and I do personally like both these things—this will hit the spot. It’s art in that register.
But it also aims to be more than just fun. Drift wants its work to be taken seriously, to both inspire and to “ask fundamental questions.” And I just don’t know if I can take it that seriously.
Taking Drift seriously as art wasn’t as much of a concern in the recent past. As a group they were well-regarded, but their output was mainly Design Miami fare. Starting about 5 years ago, however, Drift began to assume a new profile as visual art itself took a more and more high-tech, experiential turn, and the proliferation of Instagram environments started to put pressure on museums (call this the Rain Room effect).
They’ve been drawing interest around the world—literally from NASA to Burning Man—via their work with choreographed drones, and recently Drift was picked up by Superblue, the new for-profit outfit sprung from the side of the Pace mega-gallery, which is pitching itself as a dedicated purveyor of interactive immersive art as a disruptive new market force. (In fact, it is Superblue’s curator who gets credit as organizing “Fragile Future,” with the Shed seemingly reduced to helper status in its own venue.)
Drift was previously on the edge of the art world, in a quirky category of design-that-is-almost-art. Now it has leapfrogged so that it is being watched as something like the future of art. So there’s more at stake in “Fragile Future” than whether it is pleasant or not.
Installation view of Drift’s “Fragile Future” at the Shed in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
In the Shed show, the sequence of Drift-engineered attractions is designed so that the works escalate in ambition as you go along. In a first gallery, you find the show’s title work, Fragile Future (2007–21), a complex concatenation of lamps, each pinpoint LED light embedded in what appears to be a real, fluffy dandelion, filling the shadowy space with hazy, optimistic halo.
Drift, Coded Coincidence at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
Passing to the next gallery, you come upon Coded Coincidence (2021). Air currents whip around inside a long rectangular area enclosed by nets, within which Drift has deposited a large number of small, lightweight LED nodules. Lifted by the intermittent gusts, the lights bluster around in the dark, forming swarms of arabesque-ing sparks in the air, skittering from one end to the next in a way that is supposed to evoke seeds carried by the wind.
Drift, Ego, at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
Turning a corner, you arrive at Ego (2020–21), a setup of diaphanous fabric panels suspended in the air by cables. As mechanized winches around the edges pull cables in and out in a pre-programmed sequence, the fabric is flexed into a number of different forms, each suggesting a different emotional state: a stable box, a tortured cone, a defeated plane slumping to the floor.
This is the piece here that comes closest to making you feel something in “Fragile Future.” But then it is literally an exercise in forcing inanimate matter to pantomime emotion, conveying a bit of the sense of watching a robot flex facial features mechanically, cycling through human expressions.
In any case, these pieces are all engaging enough. But what everyone will remember from “Fragile Future,” is Drifters, the show-stopping main attraction/performance, staged at select times as the centerpiece.
You approach this spectacle via a prologue gallery where two connected films play. One shows New York street scenes in which giant blocks of concrete float mysteriously through the air. The other depicts similar concrete blocks being birthed from the ground in the wilderness, congregating over a plane and assembling together into some kind of immense, mysterious Tower of Babel.
Stone blocks assemble in a film shown in Drifters at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
After getting the sense of these films, you turn another corner and emerge into the Shed’s vast concert hall, its four-story ceiling towering above you. And there, actually levitating in the air above your head, are six of the enchanted concrete blocks—just like those in the film, only now in real life. (One such block was shown, to crowd-pleasing effect, at the Armory Show a few years ago, and was one of the works that made Drift’s reputation in the art world.)
A portentous, droning soundtrack projects awe and reverberates around you. The magic blocks are spotlit from all sides, with clouds of rock-concert smoke being expelled into the air periodically to accent it all with an atmosphere of drama.
A smoke machine at work during the Drifters performance at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
At first, these floating pylons drift aimlessly above, like rubble deposited in space by some kind of antigravity ray. Then, as you venture beneath them, or walk around the edges to get different views and marvel, the blocks gradually seem to wake up and to move with a kind of gathering purpose.
The music swells. The blocks unite into a pattern.
The first time I saw this show, the blocks assembled themselves vertically, formed a circle, and then descended deliberately until they were hovering just beyond the reach of the tallest person. It brought to mind an audition for a Stonehenge musical. Another time, they all went horizontal and formed a line, weaving deliberately in and out.
Visitors view Drift, Drifters, performed at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
After each assembly, the blocks return to their more random and dispersed state, drifting around aimlessly for a bit before coming to life again, a cycle of about 20 minutes.
This is vintage Big Fun Art, and photogenic as hell. As to what it makes you feel or think about, Drifters benefits from your memories of countless Hollywood films and video games where some kind of mysterious alien structure comes to life to transmit some kind of coded cosmic epiphany. But what is the substance of that epiphany?
Starting with this show’s name, “Fragile Future,” and extending through all the press around it, the artists’ own statements, and the wall text, there is an insistence on a specific mission for Drift, one that is somehow both grandiose and indistinct. The Shed advertises artists who address “urgent environmental themes in their work in order to challenge their audiences to think differently about their connections to Earth,” offering “a hopeful atmosphere for imagining a different world.”
Visitors view the floating blocks in Drifters. Photo by Ben Davis.
All the works but Ego here feature variations on that promise of environmental consciousness-raising in their texts. But there is one remaining body of work I haven’t yet mentioned is particularly and uncharacteristically clear about how Drift views its purpose: the “Materialism” series, consisting of multicolored, differently sized rectangular volumes arranged together on displays.
Via work descriptions, you quickly discover that each cluster represents the exact volume of different materials used in a variety of everyday tools: the work called Bike, for instance, is composed of a large rectangular volume of rubber, an aluminum rectangle, a smaller lacquer rectangle, and so on, to suggest bike components; iPhone is a dense cluster of tinier squares, in glass, stainless steel, polycarbonate, lithium cobalt oxide, graphite, etc.
Drift, iPhone 4S (2018). Photo by Ben Davis.
“Everything that is bought and consumed has an impact upon complex systems of resource extraction, labor, manufacturing, and distribution,” the text explains. “The ‘Materialism’ series thus calls for contemplation on how people deal with the raw materials at their disposal.”
Beyond the general unease with toxic consumer culture that pervades affluent consciousness right now, this enjoinder reflects a very specific debate about values going on within the design field. Numerous designers—including, famously, Dieter Rams, who is credited with creating the Apple aesthetic—have decried how design has played a role in lubricating a system of thoughtless consumption that is destroying the earth. Designers stand accused of encouraging people to covet cool forms and forget the underlying costs.
I’d argue that Drift’s “Materialism” series remains a little simplistic and mystifying in the designer-ly, materials-centric way it conveys this critical thought to its audience. Plenty of artists, from Allan Sekula to Jimmie Durham to Mika Rottenberg to Cameron Rowland, have forged sophisticated, thoughtful, and poetic ways of documenting the chains of human labor, energy expenditures, and environmental costs embedded in things we take for granted. And I doubt that it truly comes as a shock to the average Shed-goer that their bike is made of rubber and aluminum.
Nevertheless, there is something interesting about Drift’s deconstructive design gesture, and it is unusually concrete in pointing to what they think they are doing that’s serious.
Returning to the enigmatic spectacle of Drifters, you can see the forms of the floating mystery blocks echoing the same rectangular volumes used in the decompositions of the iPhone and the bike—symbolizing a return to elemental reality, the basic building blocks of the world laid bare.
A stone block is depicted emerging from the muck in “Fragile Futures” at the Shed. Photo by Ben Davis.
This message is not super clear, conceptually, because the Drifters are obviously meant to be concrete blocks, their main distinguishing feature being that they are studded with holes where rebar formwork ties usually stabilize the concrete during production. They thus evoke the built architectural environment, not elemental materials—even though, in the film, the blocks seem to be shown emerging whole from nature.
My guess is that the holes are a scenographic device, not a conceptual one. If the floating blocks were simple gray volumes, they wouldn’t look like much. Your mind wouldn’t readily register the illusion of a heavy thing behaving unnaturally.
At any rate, the idea of Drifters comes into view in relation to the “Materialism” series: We have become alienated from our built environment, and the floating blocks represent some kind of higher, harmonious state of consciousness where we are returned to considering and respecting it.
One of the blocks from Drifters. Photo by Ben Davis.
But the “concrete block as symbol of utopian promise” idea does not really land (so to speak), does it? It takes too long to figure it out, and the intellectual payoff for the effort is too thin. This narrative doesn’t explain what you see so much as vaguely justify the spectacle with an eco-gloss.
Notably, while “Materialism” is all about the critical gesture of detailing the fundamental components of design objects we take for granted, the labels for Drifters very deliberately do not explain how the floating-block trick works—and Drift are very clear that they don’t want to explain. That would kill the magic. (If I had to guess, I’d say the blocks are big, disguised balloons, with some kind of interior drone setup so they can be steered. The soundtrack, in addition to telegraphing wonder, serves to cover what seems to be the keen of hidden rotors.)
That kind of opacity is fine if the note we are trying to hit is arena-rock, design-art entertainment—which is what this is. But that’s the reverse, really, of getting back in touch with how our world actually works, beneath all the bells and whistles of hyper-designed consumerism.
You may be mildly inspired at the Shed that someone figured out how to make something that looks like a movie special effect happen in real life. Alas, making more and better spectacular environments is not something I have ever really doubted our society can do, so as art, “Fragile Future” does not provide me with some kind of spiritual salve or inspire me to “imagine a different world.” I can just enjoy it and then go back to work.
“Drift: Fragile Future” is on view at the Shed, New York, through December 19, 2021.
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Black American contemporary painter, installation artist, silhouettist, print-maker, and filmmaker Kara Walker’s large-scale presentation of more than 600 works at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland reads as something like the excavation of masterworks from an artist’s mind. Assembling works from some 30 years, the survey is a grand collection of archival works, plans, inner thoughts, and dreams, and seems to be both an exhibition and an imaginative biography of a Black woman’s life over time. The show, titled “A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be,” magnifies the United States’s realities of prejudice, perversion, and plunder, offering a taunting exposé of the racial, psychological, and (at times) psychosexual ties that bind and cut.
Across a broad assemblage of sketches, collages, newspaper clippings, handwritten notes, and confessions, Walker’s black pencil and deft ink strokes blur the spectator’s capacity to decipher which figures represent races, Black, white, or biracial. This blurring is symbolically important: One could say that she depicts descendants on both the right or wrong side of slavery, both the protagonists and the antagonists—but not necessarily clearly arrayed on either side, but betwixt or in between. Her vignettes, scribbles, and typed tales narrate both the artist’s and viewers’ imagined stories of social subjugation, restitution, and emancipation, sprouting from her preoccupation with the unseemly psychic aspects of a racialized master/slave dynamic.
Walker’s critics would say that the deliberately controversial style of her art warrants questioning her position as a Black commercial artist. The fact that such images are favored by an unregulated art market might also provoke some ethical questions for gallerists and collectors. Such difficult questions emerge from the way that Walker’s work displays either an inability or a refusal to positively represent one race of people—a task Black artists are often assigned.
Instead, I believe Walker has carved a liberated path for herself and her career exactly by refusing to censor her mind for the prudishness of any audience’s eyes. Walker’s pattern of playing with expected tropes is unmatched. In this epic showcase, this proposition is perhaps most memorably demonstrated in the cathartic “Success and the Stench of Ingratitude,” her 2012 series where the artist reflects on BLACK ARTISTS I ASPIRE TO BE LESS LIKE (as a text embedded in the work states), offering a list: “broke,” “forgotten,” “taken advantage of,” “bitter,” “crassly-commercial,” “short-lived,” and so on.
Installation view of “Kara Walker: A black hole is everything a star longs to be” at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo by Julian Salinas, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel.
Works within her series “Untitled” (2002-2004) and “Palmetto Libretto” (2012) embody the artist’s knack for mimicry and startling transposition of racially inspired violence. Throughout these series and in several other works by Walker, audiences find artworks depicting what seems to be sexual domination if not torture or abuse. In one image, a black mandingo and white woman appear to be locked in fierce intercourse within the bush. In another, a Black woman resembling the artist herself is drawn, tired-eyed, day-dreaming of an orgy scene featuring white men with disfigured bodies, one notably armed with a nose resembling a male’s member, molesting a handcuffed Black woman who resembles the character Mammy, played by Hatti McDaniel in Gone with the Wind. In other works, characters with white masks, akin to the Klu Klux Klan, maraud as they haunt the night.
With such images, Walker creates a form of art that is alarming to both Black and white folk, besmirching the hierarchical and archetypal roles that persist in American popular culture and folklore. Her practice deliberately exaggerates images of orientalist desires and Black minstrels. Stereotyped Black body parts such as big lips, hips, and dicks persist. Yet I read Walker’s themes of sadomasochistic lust and fascination with interracial sex, domination, and submission, with their mix of grief, pleasure, and guilt, as actually a way to claim a sense of strength—by decimating one-dimensional narratives of power.
Installation view of “Kara Walker: A black hole is everything a star longs to be” at the Kunstmuseum Basel. Photo by Julian Salinas, courtesy Kunstmuseum Basel.
I’d argue that the key to Walker’s hold over her audience is the alternation of conditions of control. In some works, slavers enjoy power by inflicting entrapment, shame, and disgrace. In others, Walker creates dreamscapes where Black characters are desired, courted, and return the favor of racially inspired violence to white figures, seemingly both deserving and undeserving. Facing this kind of manipulation of the imagery of racialized or gendered domination and fetish, the spectator—whether the ancestor of a victim or perpetrator—is both enthralled and shamed by Walker’s heinous sketches of fantasies known to exist, but restricted to private life.
A surface-level encounter with Walker’s work can offend the untrained eye. But by a deeper interaction, we might see the invention of a new constellation of thought about race, power, gender, sex, and violence. This artist’s ability to collapse definitions, boundaries, and inherited associations might unlock a new route to taking control over narratives that we can, in fact, have autonomy over.
“Kara Walker: A Black Hole Is Everything a Star Longs to Be” is on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, through September 26, 2021.
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In his Pulitzer Prize-winning paean to the natural world, The Overstory, American novelist Richard Powers describes, in Proustian detail, the rich and wondrous stratum of a forest floor. It’s a vital feature of a forest’s ecosystem, with dead wood’s natural decay playing an essential role in maintaining its health and stability. Constantly at work in the moist shadows beneath the understory, the forest floor is bustling with energy, activity—and noise.
What does the slow decomposition of organic matter sound like? Finnish artist Teemu Lehmsuruusu lets visitors to the inaugural edition of the Helsinki Biennial listen in on the life-giving hum of decay. His solar-powered artwork, House of Polypores (2021), picks up changes on the forest floor via a system of sensors and converts these movements, through organ pipes covered with self-grown mycelium bricks, into meditative drones.
Like most of the works in the Biennial, the piece is installed on Vallisaari Island, a stunning location in the Helsinki archipelago that, though only a 15-minute ferry ride from the city center, has only recently opened to visitors. Entangled by the region’s geopolitics, it was used as a military fortification by the Swedes in the 19th century, then the Russians, and finally by the Finnish army. Abandoned since the 1990s and cleared by the Finnish Defense Force in 2008, the island has grown so rich and diverse in nature that some areas were deemed off-limits by the biennial in order to protect the organisms that inhabit it.
Vallisaari, home to the Helsinki Biennial. Photo: Matti Pyykkö.
“They’re very sensitive,” the biennial’s cocurator, Pirkko Siitari, told a group of journalists while pointing at a lake that has become a habitat to six different species of bats. “All works were developed with environmental concerns and local species in mind.”
Titled “The Same Sea” to evoke the interconnectivity of all life on Earth, the first Helsinki Biennial opened to the public on June 12 after a pandemic-related one-year delay and with the tall aim of leading the way in responsible exhibition-making. In line with Helsinki’s 2035 carbon neutrality goal, an EcoCompass sustainability management system, developed by the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, has been in use by the biennial team since 2019. (The press trip, for which six journalists were flown in from England, Germany, Holland, and Spain, will be offset in accordance with its guidelines).
In practical terms, this translates to curators Pirkko Siitari and Taru Tappola focusing on local productions and video installations to reduce shipping. Two large-scale sculptural works by Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade—Pars Pro Toto (2018), shown at the 57th Venice Biennale, and Big Be Hide (2019)—were transported to Vallisaari, but will join Helsinki’s public art collection with a permanent location on the mainland.
Paweł Althamer, Seven Prisoners (2020). © Maija Toivanen HAM Helsinki Biennial 2021.
Though abandoned, the island is not free of human activity. When invited to produce a work for the biennial, Paweł Althamer learned that inmates from the open prison on the adjacent island do maintenance work on Vallisaari. He cast six inmates to co-develop and star in the VR film Seven Prisoners (2020), with the seventh played by the artist himself. The result is a magical realist jailbreak adventure that brings the escapees closer to nature, their feminine sides, and themselves. The artwork’s second part is a “making-of” documentary providing insights into the working process, and is more an art-therapy session than strict storyboarding.
With the biennial’s many open-air installations, the breathtaking and potentially transformative experience of meandering through the island’s lush nature is a well-thought-out curatorial device. It is all the more meaningful, then, to encounter works that illustrate the disastrous effects of global warming on the archipelago.
Jaakko Niemelä’s installation Quay 6 (2021) consists of a bright red wooden platform. It is shaped like the stone quay it is poised over, supported by 20-foot-tall scaffolding to indicate where the sea level would be if Greenland’s northern ice sheet were to melt completely.
Samnang Khvay, Preah Kunlong (The Way of the Spirit) (2016–17). © Maija Toivanen HAM Helsinki Biennial 2021.
Elsewhere, artists mourn mankind’s lost connection with nature. The video installation Preah Kunlong (The Ay of the Spirit) (2016–17) by Samnang Khvay focuses on Cambodia’s indigenous Chong community and their rituals. Installed nearby, the work Here to Hear (2021) is the first artistic collaboration between Sámi dancers Birit and Katja Haarla and their mother, artist and activist Outi Pieski. Inside a cavernous former fortification, they invoke Sámi deities with bass-heavy electronica and traditional handicraft.
Marked by its former military use, Vallisaari Island is dotted with bunkers and gunpowder cellars, which now house some of the biennial’s artworks. (There’s also a complex system of underground tunnels crisscrossing the island, which remains inaccessible for now.)
The location’s history is engaged through a number of artworks that touch on soldiers’ experiences and PTSD. Hayoun Kwon’s poignant animation 489 Years (2016) is based on a South Korean soldier’s account of reconnaissance operations in the Demilitarized Zone between the South and the North. She recounts being saved from certain death by noticing the striking beauty of a flower growing out of a landmine he’d nearly detonated. It is estimated that it would take up to 489 years to clear the DMZ of its landmines.
Hayoun Kwon, 489 Years (2016). © Maija Toivanen HAM Helsinki Biennial 2021.
Elsewhere on the island, artworks are installed inside the abandoned standard-issue apartments of the Pilot’s House. A series of oil landscapes, still lifes, and a self-portrait in uniform by Topi Kautonen are hung on the walls of the unit in which he used to live when he served as the army’s meteorologist on the island, in the ‘50s and ‘60s, and drew inspiration from its dramatic shorelines.
Kautonen, who later worked as a museum guard, died in 2011. He never got to see his works return to the environment that had inspired them. If the biennial’s approach is any indication, the natural sceneries he had captured will remain protected.
“The Helsinki Biennial: The Same Sea” is open through September 26, 2021.
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Portrait paintings are sometimes described as windows into the soul. The Renaissance likenesses presented in the Metropolitan Museum’s “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” have other purposes. Their cold, opulent beauty is more akin to the calculated image curation typical of modern day influencers than to the revelation of character that permeates the paintings of the Met’s nearby Alice Neel exhibition. And that, it seems, is the point of this fascinating exhibition.
This is not the High Renaissance of the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici whose patronage brought us masterpieces by Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Leonardo da Vinci. The exhibition focuses on the later 16th century rule of Florence by Cosimo I de’ Medici and introduces the cast of Mannerist painters who helped him craft his image as the city-state’s benevolent dictator.
Organized by the Met’s Keith Christiansen and Florentine professor Carlo Falciani, the exhibition is laid out in thematic sections that tell the rollicking tale of Cosimo’s rise to power and consolidation of authority through the artworks that helped make it possible.
Installation view of “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Ruthless Medici
The story begins with the machinations that brought the Medicis back to power in Florence after the reestablishment of Republican rule following their expulsion in 1494.
For forty years, Florentine Republicans had mostly held off the onslaught of the Medician autocrats through periods of civil war, plague, and siege. A potent symbol of this struggle was Michelangelo’s David. Installed in 1504 outside the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florence’s civic government, the figure’s stern resolve and youthful vitality provided inspiration for the city’s anti-Medici partisans.
The second coming of the Medici was aided by a pair of Medici Popes: Leo X, a hedonistic pontiff who bankrupted the Vatican with dynastic wars and personal luxuries, and the inept Clement VII who brought on the Sack of Rome and lost half the Church to the Reformation. However otherwise disastrous their reigns, they secured the return of the Medicis to Florence.
Jacopo da Pontormo, Portrait of a Halberdier (probably Francesco Guardi) (ca. 1528–30) with a display of arms in “The Medici” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Met
A series of skirmishes between Republicans and Medici supporters culminated in the 1529 siege of Florence which was led by Clement’s ally the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Following the city’s capitulation, Clement installed Alessandro de’ Medici as Duke. The licentious Alessandro, who may have been Clement’s illegitimate son, did not last long. He riled the city’s Republican families and was assassinated by a distant cousin in 1537 in what was celebrated as an act of tyrannicide.
Thanks to wars, murders, and early deaths of designated heirs, Florence was now running out of direct descendants of the original Medici family. As a result, the Dukedom passed to seventeen-year-old Cosimo de Medici, a descendent of a lesser branch of the family. Expected to be a weak leader destined for exile, assassination, or domination by stronger factions, he ruled Florence for over thirty years, established a Medici dynasty that lasted for two centuries and transformed Florence with art patronage and massive public works into the city we know today.

The Bronzino Touch
Although “The Medici: Portraits and Politics” includes works by such luminaries as Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, and Francesco Salviati, the real stars of this exhibition are Cosimo and his favored artist Agnolo Bronzino.
Bronzino was perfectly in tune with his patron. In numerous portraits he depicts Cosimo in a variety of guises: a young warrior in full armor whose hands caress his helmet; an older man of forty, now bearded and dressed in somber black as befitting the statesman he has become; and in an allegorical painting as Orpheus, naked from the back as he turns toward the viewer.
Bronzino, Florence Cosimo I de’ Medici as Orpheus (1537–39). Philadelphia Museum of Art; Gift of Mrs. John Wintersteen, 1950. Image: Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In all these depictions, Cosimo offers the same gaze, mask-like in its impenetrability, presenting a picture of steadfast purpose and icy control. This essential message became part of Cosimo’s cultural diplomacy. The non-allegorical portrayals were repainted multiple times and distributed as gifts to friends and potential allies.
Bronzino’s portraits offer a similar treatment of Cosimo’s family. His impressive wife Eleonora di Toledo was a granddaughter of Lorenzo de Medici and served as his frequent political advisor while bearing him eleven children. She is seen here as a gravely modest young wife and as an equally serene mother subtly pregnant as she pushes forward her equally composed young son Francesco.
Bronzino, Eleonora di Toledo and Francesco de’ Medici (ca. 1550).Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale, Pisa. Image © Haltadefinizione® Image Bank by permission of the Ministry of Cultural Activities and Heritage—Polo Museale della Toscana.
Francesco reappears elsewhere as a slightly older boy, holding a letter, and, in a 1570 painting by Bronzino’s protégé Alessandro Allori as a young man suited for battle. Francesco would succeed Cosimo as Duke of Florence in 1571, when his father went on to the more august position as the first Grand Duke of Tuscany.

Art as PR Push
None of Bronzino’s depictions of Cosimo or his family match the fierceness of Cellini’s bust of the Duke. Two versions, one in bronze and one in marble, introduce the exhibition. They present Cosimo as a supremely confident military man swathed in armor ornamented with classical motifs.
Two portrait busts by Cellini in “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Met
This representation was meant to underscore the association of Florence’s 16th century ruler with Rome’s imperious Caesar Augustus. All these official portraits seem designed to smooth over the messy trajectory of Cosimo’s rise to power, his suppression of civil liberties, the political intrigues that marked his reign, and his brutal campaigns against other city-states.
The exhibition includes portraits of other notable figures, both by Bronzino and by other artists. Among these are Francesco Salviati’s probing portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a leading banker and Republican sympathizer; Bronzino’s subtly sexualized depiction of naval commander Andrea Doria as a powerful, nearly naked Neptune; and his tribute to poet Laura Battiferri. The homosexual Bronzino carried on a long platonic relationship with this formidable woman and here depicts her in profile with features that deliberately echo those of a more allegorical painting of Dante he had created thirty years before.
Francesco Salviati, Bindo Altoviti (ca. 1545). Private Collection.Photograph © Bruce M. White, 2020.
There are as well portraits of some of the more dubious characters in this drama: The ill fated Alessandro de Medici appears in Pontormo’s portrait as a sober, cultured young man captured in the act of sketching the bust of a woman on a piece of paper. Pope Clement VII, painted by Sebastiano del Piombo just before the disastrous Sack of Rome, is a regal figure blissfully unaware of the debacle to come.
The exhibition is dotted with various artifacts. These include rapiers, halberds, and ornamented axes of the sort used by both sides in the siege of Florence, original manuscripts, a red velvet dress that may have been worn by Eleonora di Toledo, and coins that celebrate Cosimo’s architectural projects. These public works were an equally important part of his cultural legacy, dedicated to cementing Florence’s place at the epicenter of Italian Renaissance.

The Problem of Michelangelo
So as to underscore the cool sobriety of Bronzino’s approach, the show ends with a face-off between him and painter Francesco Salviati, a fellow Florentine with more cosmopolitan tastes who had lived in Rome and traveled throughout Italy. Salviati’s portraits, many of them dotted with now obscure mythological motifs, exhibit a warmth and naturalistic approach that make a striking contrast to the chilly perfection of Bronzino’s figures.
Installation view of the “Florence and Rome: Bronzino and Salviati” gallery in “The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo by Hyla Skopitz, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But perhaps a more telling comparison would have been the works of Bronzino and Michelangelo, then and now Florence’s most famous artist. Michelangelo casts a long shadow over the exhibition even though he appears here only in a portrait by Daniele da Volterra. Even unfinished, the work captures its subject’s life force and craggy vitality in a way that seems a rebuke to the flattering elegance of Bronzino’s representations.
Michelangelo posed a problem for Cosimo. Towering above other Florentine artists, he sided with the Republicans in Florence’s civil wars and fled the city forever when Cosimo came to power. Cosimo attempted unsuccessfully to lure him back and only succeeded after Michelangelo’s death, when the old master’s body was returned to Florence and given an extravagant state funeral. With this gesture, Cosimo hoped to tie himself to the revered artist and to obscure Michelangelo’s Republican sympathies. Cosimo had already brought artists of Florence under his patronage through the founding of Florence’s Accademia del Disegno. His embrace of the dead Michelangelo reveals his efforts to control the narrative of history as well.
Benvenuto Cellini, Cosimo I de’ Medici (1545). Museo Nazionale del Bargello. By permission of Ministero della Cultura. Photo by Antonio Quattrone.
But in the end, Michelangelo escaped Cosimo’s grasp. His David, now installed in Florence’s Galleria dell’Accademia, is one of the world’s most famous works of art. The generic blandness of Bronzino’s court portraits pale next to the giant slayer’s steely gaze and taut determination. David remains Michelangelo’s compelling monument to the resistance to tyranny.
Is there a lesson here for our so-called Modern Medicis? The art world is currently engaged in an unprecedented inquiry into the political and economic entanglements of museum board members and the ethics of museum patronage. As history reveals, art often finds itself in service to power. But the saga of Cosimo de Medici also suggests there are limits to the control patrons have over the power of art.
“The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512–1570” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through October 11, 2021.
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As immersive Van Gogh light experiences have opened all across the country this summer, our staff noticed a distinct tread: Our moms were contacting us about them. Whether it was the magic of Van Gogh in family lore or the magic of Facebook’s targeted marketing, the phenomenon was real. But should we actually recommend the experience to our moms? Did it hold up?
Last month, we invited Seija Goldstein—mother of Artnet News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein—onto the Art Angle podcast to get to the heart of its appeal. After that podcast was recorded, our distinguished guest finally got a chance to visit the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit in downtown New York—and so of course we wanted to share her review. Here it is.

Date of Visit: June 30, 2021
Seija Goldstein. Photo by Andrew Goldstein.
Travel to Location: I ventured to take the subway for the first time since early March 2020. It was not too crowded at midday, and almost everyone was wearing a mask. I took two trains, with a change at 34th Street station, from Upper East Side, then a longish walk in 90 Fahrenheit-plus heat to Pier 36. There were no taxis to take anywhere near the East Broadway subway stop. Use your Google Maps for walking directions; nobody I asked had any idea where the pier was.
Once I got to the pier, there was no waiting in line to get in, and I walked straight through to the third and the largest room. I could not find a seat in the largest open area and ended up in a side section.
Exterior of Immersive Van Gogh at Pier 26. Photo by Ben Davis.
The Show Itself: The show started almost immediately and I discovered that it runs for 30 minutes in a loop, with the next showing starting right away.
Inside the main chamber of Immersive Van Gogh, with the mirrored partitions at left. Photo by Ben Davis.
Images of Van Gogh’s art are projected onto the walls and, at times, on the floor. Some wall sections in the middle of the space were mirrored, so you could see the show everywhere. There were a few short benches, some chairs, and you could rent small cushions to sit on the floor.
I watched the show in the side section, on three smaller walls, and was not all that impressed. However, as I was leaving, the next show started and I found a seat in the largest open area with a huge wall, and decided to stay for a second run.
I’m happy I did, because the experience was so much better, more immersive. (Hint: If you go, sit in the back of the large third room, facing the huge wall on the right.)
Visitors contemplate a projection of a Van Gogh landscape along a large wall in Immersive Van Gogh. Photo by Ben Davis.
Van Gogh’s pictures appeared massive all around you. To me, the most impressive images were his flowers and landscapes. I wished that some of them would have stayed up longer on the screens—by the time I got my phone out to take a picture, they were gone. Overall, the colors were stunning and you really got to see Van Gogh’s signature heavy brush strokes.
Upside-down projections of Van Gogh within Immersive Van Gogh. Photo by Ben Davis.
Unfortunately, the portraits worked less well. In order to show movement, some faces twisted and distorted. A series of self-portraits at the end of show first came up upside down and then turned around, which was just weird.
Another disappointment was Van Gogh’s bedroom, where the pieces of furniture moved and turned across the screen and never seemed to find their place.
An animation builds up furniture from Van Gogh’s studio in Immersive Van Gogh. Photo by Ben Davis.
The projections were accompanied by loud music. I recognized Edith Piaf and some beautiful cello music, but most of it was not very memorable. Perhaps there was a connection to the paintings that I did not get.
The Verdict: My premium flex peak ticket cost about $70, including all fees. Was it worth it? After the first show I’d have said no way, but after the second it became a closer call.
Tickets are timed and it did not feel overcrowded, so let’s call it COVID pricing: They need to make their profit with fewer visitors and are employing quite a few people. At the same time I got a little shot of culture after a long drought. A bit pricy for 30 minute show, but under the circumstances, who’s complaining!
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How did Van Gogh become the hottest artist of the post-quarantine, return-to-physical-spaces moment?
I speak, of course, not of the real artist named Vincent Van Gogh, with his old-timey tale of suffering and transcendence. I speak of the undead mash-up of Van Gogh’s paintings with projection mapping, animation, and music, now doing beaucoup business in dozens of cities across the globe in one of the largest coordinated art phenomena of all time.
A romantic scene set in a Van Gogh light environment was featured in the hit Netflix time-waster Emily in Paris, which certainly helped incept the idea in the public mind during quarantine. And, indeed, these ubiquitous immersive Van Gogh Gesamtkunstwerks have essentially the same relation to Van Gogh, the artist, that the real Paris has to the Darren Star version of Paris of Emily in Paris. Maybe less.
A message from Emily in Paris star Lily Collins greets visitors in the “Immersive Van Gogh” gift shop. Photo by Ben Davis.
There’s something ironic—or maybe just telling—in the fact that, after a year of viewing art only in placeless online spaces, the hot art ticket now is a digitally augmented simulation.
New Yorkers currently have two opportunities to participate in the phenomenon: “Immersive Van Gogh” at Pier 36, and the comically similarly named “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” at Skylight on Vesey, across from the solemn hulk of the Irish Hunger Memorial. Both share the same central attraction—a room where you bathe in projected versions of Van Gogh’s paintings accompanied by stately music—though each has its own bunch of add-ons thrown in to try to out-Van Gogh the competition.
Trying out the augmented reality feature of “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Immersive Van Gogh” offers a chic Van Gogh cafe; a series of light booths where, via some dubious science, you can experience how Van Gogh might have heard colors; a glitchy Augmented Reality feature where you can call up Van Gogh’s most famous paintings onto frames on the wall, via your smartphone; and an Artificial Intelligence component where you can write “Van Gogh” a letter on your phone and receive a response immediately, which you can then have printed out in the gift shop on vintage paper.
There is an “Immersive Van Gogh” date night package where you rent a special booth and get Van Gogh-themed massage oil (sunflower oil, presumably). The gift shop is ginormous and the place, currently, to buy a Sunflowers thermos or Starry Night bucket hat.
A 3D recreation of Bedroom in Arles at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience,” the rival, offers its own extras: an educational film about Van Gogh’s relation to color; a huge sculpture of a vase with animations of different Van Gogh still lifes projected on it, so that it seems to morph from one giant pot of flowers to the next; a 3D sculpture version of Bedroom in Arles; and a room where kids can do Van Gogh coloring pages and have them scanned into a projection.
Visitors enjoy the virtual reality component of “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Its high card in the Van Gogh Wars is a neat VR experience that floats you through an imagined pastoral landscape. Magic picture frames periodically appear over bits of your virtual surroundings, and are then filled in with paintings, illustrating how real places may have inspired Van Gogh’s famed works (even if you are not actually looking at real places, but at some kind of simulated videogame version of Van Gogh’s world). The gift shop here is beefy, but less impressive.
When it comes to answering the most basic question—which is better?—”Immersive Van Gogh” stands above “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” The animations are crisper, the environment grander and more spacious, the choreography of images somewhat less cheesy, the musical choices more interesting (Handel, Edith Piaf, and Thom Yorke versus a more generically cinematic sounding score).
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” does lean a little more toward the informative, with portentous Van Gogh quotes dropped into the soundtrack and splashed across the walls, and some projections tagged with lumbering titles such as “Sunflowers series” or “Tree Roots (last known painting).” A corridor of Van Gogh Facts that you walk through to get to the central light room leans hard into the kind of florid mythology you don’t see in mainstream art institutions anymore, e.g. of the painting Wheatfield with Crows, it explains that it “symbolizes the arriving of a kind of smiling death that arises serenely in broad daylight in a golden and very pure light that leads to the following reflection: is this madness that makes an art genius of him?”
The Potato Eaters, animated, within “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
“Immersive Van Gogh” contains such incongruities as a giant-sized image of The Potato Eaters, Van Gogh’s image of destitute rural labor, or a god-sized figure of Van Gogh’s humble postman, from New York’s own Museum of Modern Art, towering down at you at bombastic billboard scale.
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh,” one of two competing Van Gogh light environments currently open in New York. Photo by Ben Davis.
But nothing in “Immersive Van Gogh” is quite so goony as those moments in “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” where various paintings are brought to life, so that Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette appears to literally puff a cigarette, or Sorrowing Old Man actually appears to weep, or, inexplicably, Café Terrace at Night is transformed into a curtain blowing in the wind, the image divided like one of those rubber curtains at a carwash.
Cafe Terrace at Night, animated, inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
To circle back around to where we started, though: Why Van Gogh? Why now?
I don’t really think that it is that complicated. Van Gogh’s paintings are beloved and beautiful, and escapism and beauty are what art-goers have said they want from the post-pandemic art experience over anything else.
A worker polishes one of the large mirrored sculptures in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Van Gogh is certainly the most pop culturally pervasive artist, from Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life to Willem Dafoe in At Eternity’s Gate, with something-for-everyone stop-offs in between at Martin Scorsese playing Van Gogh in Akira Kirosawa’s Dreams or that one episode of Dr. Who where the doctor brings Van Gogh forward in time to weep at his posthumous fame at the Musée d’Orsay.
Van Gogh’s oft-biopic-ed story of the Artist as Suffering Outcast, of his missionary, suffering love for art, of failure vindicated by posthumous acclaim—“The Man Suicided by Society” as Antonin Artaud once put it—is one of the three major archetypes that form the bedrock of the broadest public’s image of artists (the other two being Artist as Rule-Breaking Free Spirit and Artist as Decadent Fraud).
inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
And yet, here is the interesting thing about the present wave of interest: Very little of the typical Van Gogh lore is to be found in what these immersive Van Gogh rooms are selling. There’s nary a severed ear on offer.
Both the New York experiences are startlingly abiographical. Both pass through Japonisme sections (“Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” briefly exits his oeuvre entirely to animate some Ukiyo-e hits), and feature sections dedicated to projected galleries of his self-portraits staring at you in simultaneous judgment. Both animate the Starry Night in more or less inventive ways.
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Both have mournful sections where the mythologized specter of Wheatfield With Crows suggests, if you know its place in the lore, that our hero is heading toward an end (and that the loop is almost over). Both have intimations of his time in the asylum, telegraphed via his paintings of it. But the famous beats of the Van Gogh biography really just linger behind all this like an afterimage, lending a sense of gravitas and narrative to an otherwise lightweight and amorphous experience.
Inside “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Knowing anything about Van Gogh only very slightly adds to the experience in either case—in fact, “Immersive Van Gogh” probably works slightly better than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Van Gogh” precisely because it unburdens itself more completely of the half-hearted attempt to be educational, and so feels more comfortable in its own skin.
Mainly you just sit there and let the Post-Impressionist fireworks go off all around, saying “I recognize that,” “I recognize that,” and, sometimes, “now, what’s that from?”
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
It’s actually rather striking: Here is Van Gogh, an artist whose biography is as popularly known as any artist, ever. And here we are in a moment, within the museum world proper, when biography has never been more important, with the worthiness or unworthiness of an artist’s life casting its light over how everything is valued. But in this ultra-popular new kind of art space, biography is a setting sun.
The more I have thought about it, the more I realized that “Immersive Van Gogh” and “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” are not for fans of Van Gogh, the artist. They are for fans of the Starry Night, the poster. As a genre of art or art-like experience, these attractions are the product of several generations of Van Gogh merch and Van Gogh popular culture, so that the “original context” that these images tie back to, as memories, is not the museum at all.
“Starry Night—one of my favorites!”, the intrepid Emily declares in Emily in Paris as she enters the Parisian Van Gogh room on which “Immersive Van Gogh” is based. “Did you know Van Gogh painted it while having a nervous breakdown?”, her friend Camille says. “Uh… no, I did not,” Emily replies. Her combination of enthusiasm and obliviousness is meant to be relatable.
An enormous Van Gogh self-portrait greets visitors to “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
The character is a professional Instagram marketer. The most normal, relatable, and marketable mode of interacting with famous art, in the age of ubiquitous photography, is to take a photo of yourself standing beside it. Viewed from this angle, there is really nothing incongruous about turning it into an immersive-art backdrop. That was already how it was apprehended within the contemporary experience economy. Only secondarily was it an object with any kind of alterity outside of that.
Symbolic of this fact, at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” you are greeted at entry and exit by a gallery of blown-up reproductions of Van Gogh paintings, presumably to convey a sense of the actual artworks that inspire the light show. But these god-awful simulacra are rendered on canvas as completely smooth printouts, leaving you with the impression that the “originals” it is working from, too, were not the paintings but flat images. Van Gogh without the impasto is like, I don’t know, facetuning Frida Kahlo to give her Lily Collins eyebrows.
Display of replica Van Gogh self-portraits at “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Van Gogh was and is known for how the tactility and physicality of the paint, as if he is conveying the intensity and rawness of experience. Fredric Jameson famously took Van Gogh’s paintings as the paradigm of modernism, with their suggestion of depth—physical and emotional—opposing them to Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes, ghostly images of commodities reduced to shimmering, silkscreened flatness, symbolizing contemporary postmodern culture’s knowingly affectless, media-saturated superficiality. In that sense, these Van Gogh experiences have a kind of a symbolic potency as a synthesis of these poles: the idea of modernist depth itself is itself just a ghostly, marketable simulation itself.
The most dominant current of the most dominant mainstream commercial culture is defined by reboots and reanimations of nostalgia fare, permuted and remixed and given a contemporary makeover in terms of sensibility and special effects (e.g. Disney remaking its own beloved animated hits in shambolic live-action form.) The immensely popular Digital Van Gogh trend, appearing largely outside of museums and unrepentantly for-profit, is the art version of that same zeitgeist. That’s the culture that dominates in a moment as anxiety-ridden and overrun with images as the one we live in: safe bets.
A selection of Vincent van Gogh lollipops from the cafe in “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
I am using lightly moralizing language here, but let me just say, I tend to view such things as an effect and not a cause. They are the product of the way visual culture already works.
It was the museums themselves that merchandised Van Gogh into commercialistic ubiquity, as they leaned into blockbuster Great Men of Modernism shows. To claim now that a public that views Van Gogh first as a great poster artist are missing the point runs contrary to what the art context itself has been teaching for decades, in the gift shop. I imagine that for some, there is even a kind of pleasant honesty to the immersive Van Gogh experience, which is ingratiating without the tortured split personality of the museum presentation.
Inside “Immersive Van Gogh.” Photo by Ben Davis.
Despite many reservations, I enjoyed these shows for what they were (“Immersive Van Gogh” more than “Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience.”) I suppose I can identify with Emily’s friend Camille rather than Emily (though, unpromisingly for my metaphor, Emily does steal her boyfriend). There are, of course, important dimensions of art that come with knowing something and looking slowly at the paintings, and these for-profit (and very expensive, ticket-wise!) experiences in some ways are deliberately scanting these to service the largest possible audience.
But the contemporary reality is that no one new arriving to Van Gogh will attain those shores except by crossing these waters, and its probably worth stating that it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Immersive Van Gogh is a part of the Van Gogh legend now, as much as the letters to Theo.
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