'Unmonumental' at the New Museum

After hearing so many negative things about the inaugural show at the new New Museum, I really draged my feet before heading down to check it out. Since the waves of negativity primed me for a bad show, I was in the best possible place to go see it: Things could only look up from what I was expecting. Right?

Right.

It's not as bad as you've heard, but let's face it: it's still not good.

The show features lots of work using disposable materials, magazines and cardboard boxes and couches found on the curb. This doesn't make it a bad show. What makes it a bad show is the lack of originality or ambition.

Since it was my first trip to the new space, I kept thinking about the shows I saw at the old New Museum. One of my favorites was Tom Friedman, whose work was done with fingernail clippings, bubble gum, and construction paper. I loved his show because he seemed to think long and hard about his mediums and what strctural power they had embedded inside their physicality. When he made a bird skeleton out of fingernail clippings, it made sense. The shapes and endurance of fingernails speak to the toughness and texture of bone.

However, when someone paints an old iron plow neon orange, it's just there. It's novel without being connected. The response doesn't resonate, and maybe that's the point.

The thing I kept thinking was that art has to be more than what creative people do when they're bored. It's hard for me to fault artists. I fault curators, who might be out of touch with the larger world or experiencing anxiety about art's importance.

The work that greeted me when I came onto the fourth floor out of the stairwell was Oliver Laric's YouTube montage of people singing 50 Cent. It's a great video. I've rated it as a favorite on YouTube and given it 5 stars. But let's face it: In a museum, it's boring.

I love the Web. I love that people respond to a song, do their own versions, and mix it up. But doing a straight montage of 50 different videos and showing it in a loop where users have no control and can't really interact is completely antithetical to the way the Web works and the way people have begun to demand more of a say in popular culture.

I just kept thinking about an abstract curator, knowing the internet is somehow changing art, but not quite knowing how things are changing. So you go with something you know -- a video loop -- that has the internet as its subject, only without any of the power or magic of realy interactivity.

How about a station where museum-goers can do their own mix of these 50 videos? How about a booth where they can sing and record their own versions? One-way art about interactivity doesn't seem to work so well.

And that experience captured my experience of the show generally. There were ideas there, but they weren't given form or pushed far enough. I don't demand masterpieces, but I do want more from art than to experience it through headphones.

(Click here for my review of the new space)