So You Wouldn't Have To
Blockbusted at the Brooklyn Museum. Plus a new record from Stubborn, cheap red wine, and a 👏 celebration 👏 of 👏 criticism 👏
While the rest of you decamped to Basel—reports indicate that the tap water was potable and the Basel Social Club was “cheugy”—those of us stuck on this side of the ocean found other ways to entertain ourselves. There was the mopping up of benefit season, catching the Trisha Donnelly show before it closed, or even visiting one’s relatives. Or, of course, one could pay a visit to the show of the summer, It’s Pablo-matic.
Confession: I was one of the few people who enjoyed the widely loathed Paul Chan January 6 drawing at Greene Naftali last year—I thought it was funny, or at least not as self-serious as everyone took it to be. There were weeping puppy dogs, for Christ’s sake. Thus I derived a good deal of amusement from the moaning it sparked among the cringe police. They were sincerely inflamed, and sincerity is the cringiest thing of all.
Thus my hopes were high for It’s Pablo-matic. If literally everyone hates something so much, it’s got to be doing something right.
No, dear reader, it does not.
The show is so bad, in fact, that it doesn’t make much of an impression. It’s a jumble of artworks with no discernible logic; a piece from one of its several sections could be interchanged with one from any other. It is so bad that it fails to meet basic professional standards for a museum exhibition, beyond things like climate control. And it’s not even accidentally comic.
On the plus side, Picasso is barely involved, mostly just some works on paper from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection and MoMA’s. You would think that if you wanted to talk about how much some person or phenomenon was sheerly terrible, you would show some examples of it being terrible. But illustrating Picasso’s personal misogyny is difficult in this context, and trying to extract it from some drab etchings feels absurd.
The collapse of basic compare-and-contrast mechanisms means that any positive thesis of the show would have nothing to work against. Fortunately there is no thesis. No coherent picture is presented of the numerous artists who happen to be women who have been dragooned (to use Jason Farago’s mot juste) into the exhibition. There are some great works in the show, though, which make a visit not a total waste of time: Howardena Pindell’s brutal Free, White, and 21; a great Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail (1973); a cool Marisol; a scary, unexpected Cindy Sherman from 1985.
One thing I wondered while walking around among a nonplussed-but-willing Sunday-afternoon crowd was whether the curators simply assumed people know about Picasso and his life, that a general knowledge of the mythos and the misdeeds will fill in all the gaping holes in their presentation. Fifty years ago, maybe. But today people just think of him as the guy who puts noses on the sides of people’s faces.
As for the Gadsby gimmick, it manifests in an unbearable ten minutes or so of their special Nanette in a little screening room and in the wall labels: the ones that accompany Picasso works feature commentary from Gadsby alongside more conventional art copy. Could that tactic be interesting, the museum in effect subtweeting itself? Yes, in theory. The problem is that Gadsby makes childish, execrable, just plain idiotic jokes. (The one lodged painfully in my head is “Meta? I hardly know her.”) The unspeakable truth revealed by It’s Pablo-matic is that Hannah Gadsby is unspeakably unfunny.
The ultimate question with any show at the Brooklyn Museum is: Is it worse than KAWS? Given that I did not—content warning—want to kill myself after leaving It’s Pablo-matic, no, it is not. The spectacle of seeing adults lining up to gape at teen-bedroom-room décor and literal toys felt far more catastrophic, no matter what Thomas Crow had to say about it. Given that the museum has also hosted a Bruce High Quality Foundation show, it’s not even the second-worst in its history.
One subtext of the critical savaging of It’s Pablo-matic is that it’s somehow bad for people, that it’s going to give the masses a mistaken idea about art history, or Picasso, or Joan Semmel or Linda Nochlin or Carolee Schneemann or whomever. I wouldn’t worry. Another subtext is relief, as if to say, Whew, thank god we (“we” being mostly typologically straight white guys like myself) can finally vent all our frustration with quote-unquote identity politics because a show in that vein rolled around that everyone agrees is total garbage.
Annals of Coincidence
Neck-in-neck with Pablo-matic for show of the summer honors is the sequel to last year’s blockbuster Painting’s New Tool. Opening Monday—tonight!—is Ugly Painting, an exhibition at Nahmad Contemporary about beauty coyly pretending to be about its obverse.
Lots of A-listers are on the exhibition’s roster, but surely its most artful feature will be this story placement:
Kudos to the author for getting off a few nice lines—and for getting paid to write a four-page advert for artwork you’re trying to sell.
Books, Part One
RIP Cormac McCarthy, you would loved it when the Manhattan Art Review guy started talking about the Judge for some reason when asked about his critical philosophy in a moribund Irish bar in a condo building full of retired cops and bus drivers
Books, Part Two
As you may have heard, Bookforum is back!
You may recall that this development was predicted in Spigot mere weeks ago, when BF’s frequent contrib Christian Lorentzen published an oddly timed lament for the mag in the Washington Post. Quoth me:
Advertisement in the guise of editorial content is a big trend these days, apparently! Though I’m joking, a bit, in this case: Lorentzen’s piece appeared in the Opinion section, and he was hardly driving up Bookforum’s value to profit off its sale.
Good luck to the new Bookforum! You may support the mag by subscribing here.
Music
Stubborn—S/T. Been having a hard time listening to music with words lately—I’ve got enough voices in my head already. Fortunately Stubborn is putting out a new album this week, and it’s good. The New York trio is minimalist, dubby, droney, shrieky, with more rock in its bones than some experimental outfits, like the Dead C with less whistling and grinding.
The members of the band also happen to be artists—try not to hold it against them! —viz., Jeffrey Joyal, Valerie Keane, and Bradley Kronz. Joyal and Kronz happen to have shows up at this very moment, the former in New York and the latter in Fribourg, CH; Keane’s most recent joint appears to have been last year in Paris. To launch the record, they’re holding two NYC events: a listening session at Montez Press Radio on Wednesday and a show at David Lewis Thursday.
Wine
Josh Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Vintage 2020. With summer afoot, you may find yourself far from your local natural-wine purveyor as you pass a few days lolling by a lake or taking in the sea spray. What do you drink when your pop-top hard-seltzer Fresca is unavailable? What bottle do you grab in an aisle full of Woodbridge?
The grocery-store wine I’ve perversely wanted to try a million times is Josh. Surely you recognize the excruciating name, inscribed in cloying cursive on the label. While visiting my family recently in the provinces, I strolled to the nearest enoteca—Wal-Mart Supercenter #630—and picked up a bottle of the cab, Josh’s first and most iconic varietal. I hate cabernet, so the relative difference between this one and a good one would seem less dramatic than if it were something I liked.
And? It turns out Josh is just fine if you calibrate your expectations. I wouldn’t describe it as structured, exactly, but at least it’s not obnoxiously woody. It’s got a little mint on the palate when it’s fresh, a little of that vanilla-y cabernet thing, also sage, strawberry, fresh garbage bag. It’s sweeter than I’d like, but isn’t cabernet gluey anyway? I drank it with lamb chops and oven-roasted lemon potatoes and nothing was ruined. While it’s no Rex Goliath, you could do much worse.