A Divine Gas
Jun. 26th, 2007 08:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, I had an opportunity recently to spend an evening at the Seattle Art Museum. I'm afraid I'm only a little bit happier with the SAM than I am with the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I visited earlier this month. The new space is quite beautiful, and the lighting is much better, but I miss the majesty of the old marble steps with the Middle Eastern lions watching as you ascended into the space.
It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace.
There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum?
SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired.
It is less crowded and they do have room for more. Unfortunately, I find their idea of "more" to be somewhat wanting. First, there's the huge art piece which consist of nine Ford Taurus's suspended from the ceiling with lit cables come out of them, called Inopportune: Stage One, which is free to anyone who walks into the lobby. Nifty, in a way, but hardly communicative: it looks like the sort of thing one takes on for the mere technical challenge. "Look, I can hang cars from the ceiling!" There's the piece Some/One, which is impressive for the amount of effort that goes into it, and it's nice to see it have enough floorspace.
There's a big new section on Pop Art, which is kinda fun if you're into that thing. It has Warhols, and the different galleries as you walk through them try to explain the evolution of modern art, with sections on impressionism, abstraction, surrealism. They've got a few Rothko's, which are important pieces for their day, but the Warhols just leave me cold. There's the flat anime-inspired Red Eyed Tribe by Chiho Aoshima (who's other work, A Divine Gas, I think is gorgeous and hilarious all at the same time), which was interesting but begs the question: is a photoshop-drawn mural that can be printed anywhere, anytime, really a fitting piece for a museum?
SAM really is a "thing you'll like if you like that sort of thing" place. I guess I wasn't muchly inspired by it. Then again, given the reasons I was there, I was distracted and not much in the mood to be inspired.
