New age art

The Rubin's one of my favorite museums, in part because they try new things.

Even if (especially if?), sometimes, the things they try make you raise an eyebrow, which was my reaction after reading Mia Fineman's Times piece, Travels Abroad Lead to Journeys Within:

On a recent Thursday afternoon the photographer Lynn Davis sat nursing a cappuccino in the airy, ground-floor cafe of the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. The Rubin, which opened in 2004, is primarily devoted to the Buddhist art of Himalayan Asia, and that afternoon Ms. Davis, a slender woman with translucent skin and a gleaming mane of white hair, seemed to radiate an air of inner tranquillity and relaxed contemplation. ...

Although Ms. Davis’s photographs don’t relate directly to the Rubin’s mission of promoting the art and culture of the Himalayas, the committee felt that her work “was in line with the values and energy of the place,” said Mr. Melcher, who helped organize the exhibition and published the accompanying catalog.

“It couldn’t be more appropriate because Lynn has traveled a spiritual path,” he said. “She is a student of Buddhism, and it’s an undercurrent in her work that people haven’t looked at before.”

Of the 30 photographs on view several depict important Buddhist sculptures and monuments in China, Japan and Thailand. In others the religious reference is more oblique. A tightly framed photograph of stone steps half-covered by desert sand in a cemetery in Dunhuang, China, powerfully evokes the Buddhist principle of impermanence. The relationship between form and emptiness, another fundamental concept in Buddhist philosophy, finds expression in a dramatic view of the sky through a hollow rock formation at Arches National Park in Utah.

In order to integrate the show more fully with the Rubin’s collection of more than 2,000 Himalayan paintings, sculptures, textiles and prints, the museum invited Ms. Davis to choose a group of artifacts to be displayed in the galleries alongside her pictures.

At first glance the eight objects she selected — all elaborately detailed, metalwork sculptures — seem to have little in common with the spare, elemental forms in her photographs. But for Ms. Davis the objects and images have a deeper resonance.

“I don’t want to use the word spiritual,” she said, “but the spirit behind them is the same.”

Although Ms. Davis has some familiarity with Eastern religious art from her travels in Asia, she chose the objects on the basis of their beauty or emotional appeal, not necessarily for their art-historical significance. (She replaced several of her initial selections with artifacts that the Rubin’s curators considered more noteworthy.) ...

An eighth-century statue of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara with 10 radiating arms had a somewhat more prosaic appeal. “That’s how I feel when I’m on the road with all my bags and cameras,” she said. “I often wish I had a few extra arms when I’m working.”

I don't know; I'm planning to go see the exhibit, and will probably 'like' it.

But the knock on non-Western art collections in the West for years has been its amateurish nature--I have literally seen items in museums that were encased behind glass just because they looked 'exotic' or were from some 'remote' corner of the world, rather than on the grounds of any artistic merit.

I mean, even if the artistic judgment of Western curators isn't that developed when it comes to non-Western art, at least they should apply it, rather than in essence saying well, it/they all looks/look the same, it's not Picasso so who cares.

This Rubin exhibit could be a return to those days; it's definitely all very New Agey, which in my book means an insulting denial of merit, even as the practioners mouth platitudes.

True knowledge doesn't come easy; I'm not sure museum exhibits should be built on someone browsing through the collection, picking out what makes them 'feel' a certain way, judging entirely based on looks.

I mean, that's the job of the museum visitor.

“Iceberg #6, Disko Bay, Greenland, 1988" by Lynn Davis via the Times