Roberta Smith mentions in Fridays New York Times that the Picasso show at Gagosian looks better than any museum could without wall text and without admission, it assumes that visitors know how to look at art and it keeps distractions to a minimum.
This is a great compliment on a couple of different levels
1. It shows that Gagosian knows how to put on a show together like it’s no ones business – and seeing that this is his business, it’s good to see he knows what he’s doing.
more importantly,
2. It avoids something that I find annoying – especially in group shows or secondary market solo shows. The approach that the work on display is treated like it’s some kind of science project. More and more I see the art presented in a way that the curator is putting a predefined conclusion to the work, while treating the viewer as some schmuck that has never seen a show. The main culprits of this are; overuse of wall text, extensive secondary texts and salon style hanging- usually over a table of pamphlets or oblique ephemera.
I’ve spoken of this before and I’ll probably speak of it again, this approach – the high school science fair approach, is doing nothing for the work, the institutions that show the work or in any real way expanding the range of the art’s contextual issues. What it does is serve some kind of limp academic curatorial desire. I’ve seen enough of that to last a long time.
Thank you for saying this. Too many exhibitions seem to suffer from a curatorial horror vacui.
It is always refreshing to see exhibitions where the artists and curators involved have the courage to let the work stand.
Considering the world we live in people are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to reading images. It doesn’t hurt to let them.
Amen.