Word: mfa
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...MFA may have only featured these three short films for one evening (in most cases with live presentations by the artists themselves), but the indication was clear: spoken-word, poetry slamming and video-art are fast making their way into the art-world's equivalent of mainstream culture. Unfortunately, though, the performance also offered a warning about the complexities of adapting literature into a visual medium...
...depends not on their individual merit, but largely on the fact that they were created by one of the artists who later invented cubism. Had Picasso died in 1906, the date of the exhibition's last painting, we might question whether these same works would be hanging in the MFA today...
...issues for Chinese painting. In fact, the dramatic meeting of the two religious traditions, Buddhism and Daoism, and their dialogue with a third belief system, Confucianism, is the intellectual thread that Matsutaro Shoriki Curator of Asiatic Art Wu Tung attempts to draw across the three spacious galleries of the MFA's Gund Gallery. Nor should it bother us so much, at this stage in the game, that the scholar's rock and the Buddhist relief are utterly divorced from any notion of social function or historical relevance. As the exhibition labors to argue, the apparent ahistoricism of the initial salvo...
...Song Dynasty (960-1279) painting. Chen Rong's Nine Dragons scroll is accorded a central place as the source of the exhibition's title. There is also an impressive series of 10 Buddhist Lohan paintings from the temple of Kaitoku-ji in Kyoto, Japan (originally shown in the MFA's first Chinese painting exhibition...
...course, such a perplexing lack of arrangement is symptomatic of Asian art exhibitions in general. Museums are frequently forced to present the "entire picture" under the constraints of increasingly fewer slots in the exhibition schedule and decreased funding and audiences. Given these harsh realities, the MFA must be commended not only for hosting one of the best Asian art collections in this country but also for its willingness to exhibit the gems of that collection, albeit in less than perfect order...