Gorgeous? Only Mostly.

The current exhibit at the Asian Art Museum is entitled Gorgeous, one of those pretentious adjectival titles so beloved of show organizers scrambling for a label, any label, to encompass the miscellany they have scrounged together. My sweetie wanted to see the show, so we went on a pleasant Saturday. The ticket price was reasonable. The exhibit was divided into four parts, although the sequence was not apparent without explicit guidance. I'm still not sure what the justification for the division, other than space, was. Many of the items were very beautiful, quite a few were fairly pretty, some were baffling, and a very few should not have been in an exhibit entitled Gorgeous! The statue of Michael Jackson and Bubbles (the chimpanzee, not Fred Astaire's tap dance tutor) was pretty - a bit tacky and shiny, and something which the Ancien Regime would have loved. The abstract art, especially the paintings, held a tenuous position - my beloved could see no worth in them, but I had to concede that the proportions followed a pleasing geometry. The display of an iPhone offended my very sense of art - not a block carved or painted in the shape or colors of an iPhone, not one constructed or mutilated by the artist, but just an iPhone. Found art requires a context - otherwise, it's just an object! The display of an iPhone as art should also serve as an indictment of the art- and music-starved education of the millennial generation.

A different item which suffered from lack of context was the quartered pile of rubble in Room 4 of 4. If it were in the vicinity of a bombed-out building like those of Cocteau's post-World War II Orpheus, or next to Grace Cathedral when the grand stairs had been demolished, I could have deemed it art; without that context, an informational poster updating a committee on building progress would be more artistic. And then there was the urinal, well-made and clean, and by no means the ugliest thing in the exhibit. Craftmanship has become rare, but so rare that there is no difference between good design and artistic creativity? If there were an artist in this situation, it was the designer of the urinal model, not the vapid artiste who ordered it from home furnishing.