Fairly scathing article by Michael Kimmelman in today’s NYTimes basically saying that the Chanel show at the Met is below a review. He just rips into the whole ‘sponsored’ exhibition thing that major NYC museum’s have been doing for a while.

Now comes the Met with its current Chanel-sponsored Chanel show, a fawning trifle that resembles a fancy showroom. Sparsely outfitted with white cube display boxes and a bare minimum of meaningful text, this absurdly uncritical exhibition puts Coco’s designs alongside work by the current monarch of the House of Chanel, Karl Lagerfeld.

via: Art, Money and Power

I found this interesting:

The Chanel show avoids mentioning her activities during the war, when she maintained a life in Paris as the lover of an SS officer and, according to her biographer, Janet Wallach, tried to exploit Nazi laws to wrest control of her perfume business from her Jewish partners.

I have to admit having an apologist steak for museum’s that need to do this. It’s usually obvious when an exhibition’s been bought and paid for. When it’s a pay-off, you don’t expect to see art, you expect to see an ad. Hopefully they only need to this once every few years. The rest of the time they hang shows with integrity.

This balance needs to tip heavily in the direction of art and curatorial integrity however. If the ratio btw integrity and whorishness is 6:1, we’re OK. If it tips more to 3:1 or 1:1, then museums are in serious trouble. permanent link to this post