Word: showings
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...work after work in "Sensation," and there are some 92 pieces by 42 artists spread out over nearly 22,000 sq. ft. of gallery space, you see the same calculation peeking its tongue-wagging little head out of the art. Much of what's on show here really ought to be viewed the way another work about another Mary was--last year's bathroom-humor blockbuster, Something About Mary. It's lewd and long on visual pratfalls, and there is not a great deal else to do but roll your eyes as you pass Sarah Lucas' Au Naturel...
...elephant dung, Rudolph Giuliani, New York City mayor and all-but-declared U.S. Senate candidate, refused to pay the October installment of the city's $7 million subsidy to the museum. The city further claimed that the institution, in league with Christie's auction house, a sponsor of the show and the seller of $2.6 million of Saatchi's art last year, was knowingly trying to raise the value of Saatchi's collection. It then filed suit to throw the museum--one of the finest in the country--out of the gracious city-owned building that has been its home...
...plain and sometimes ugly truth is that when this sort of work sticks its jaw out into the wider world, its jaw turns to glass. That is surely the case with the lightning rod of the show, Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). The work, which has now been placed behind Plexiglas, with a velvet rope in front and a guard standing by to protect it from any angry viewers, is a perfectly competent rendering of a Christian icon--a central figure on a ground of gold. The drawing of an African Mary (Ofili is of Nigerian descent...
Throughout the show, there's an obsession with the body, leering humor about sex and yammering about death. Tracey Emin's canvas tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995) is done inside with crudely laid-out names and notes about old paramours. It camps out a short distance from Mona Hatoum's more elegant but hardly deep creation (despite its title, Deep Throat): a dining table with proper tablecloth and silver, and a plate whose bottom is a video screen showing the travels of an invasive camera down a human gullet...
...that the Chapmans' puerile offerings will rise to a place of lasting esteem. No, the point is that work once seen as scandalous takes on new meaning as culture is rocked by alien, disquieting expressions and then slowly evolves. And there are works in this show that warrant respect and have had it from critics and gallerygoers for some time...