Word: tutting
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Ever since the King Tut spectacular, corporations have been looking for glamour art shows to sponsor as public relations coups. The logic of this situation, pressed to its extreme, is that the museum curator becomes a mere appendage to the p.r. firm, which finds a "sexy" theme, sells it to the client, sets up the package and punches it into museum schedules. Such is the case with "Hawaii: The Royal Isles," a blockbuster without the block, which opened last week at the Art Institute of Chicago. Until 1983, as it trundles from one major museum to another around...
...galleries at a speed dictated by an attendance of 8,000 people a day.* In such circumstances, no one can absorb the scope and the depth of the man. How can one "see" in two hours what took nearly 80 years of such obsessive activity to produce? The "Tut Law," or curse of the mummy, by which works of art become invisible as the museum audience for them expands, will work against this show. That is all the more ironical since this is not an affair of little scholarly value, like the traveling Tutankhamun exhibit seen by more than...
...collection of illustrations that accompanied 16th century Iranian epic poems. Although the paintings--the majority of which are drawn from the two books--dazzle at 50 paces, they don't quite have the flash of recent popular exhibitions. The Persian miniatures lack the lustrous, overpowering gold of Tut, the intricate bejeweled splash of the Sythian gold, or the chic of just-released objects of Chinese archeology. If anything, the exhibit's origin--Iran--work against its success. But "Wonders of the Age," like its proprietor, is not your average exhibit...
...breath-a resounding popular success. The number of people who crowd into the show on the Beaubourg's top floor every day is between 8,000 and 12,000, a remarkable turnout for a live artist in a country whose public has never much liked modern art. Only Tut could pack them in like this. Culture votes with its feet, ratifying Dali's insight that in an age of mass communications, it is better to seem than to be: success, in effect, is the triumph of packaging over contents...
...public is interested in or is it a spectator sport? I think these are serious concerns because while some exhibitions have been able to pull in such huge audiences, curators are having trouble raising the funds to put on more "scholarly" exhibitions...If people just go to museums because Tut is highly publicized on television and radio, whether that then makes them a regular museum goer I think is highly questionable...