So - how bad is the Dale Chihuly show?

Chihuly's Ikebana Boat: shouldn't some Oompa-Loompas be rowing this thing?

Recently something very strange occurred in the pages of the Boston Globe. Its star art critic, Sebastian Smee, whose glittering paeans to things everybody can agree on had just won him a Pulitzer Prize, did something he'd never done before.

He dared not to like a great big fat crowd-pleaser.

Smee's target was Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass, the MFA's current blockbuster devoted to the output - I won't call it an oeuvre - of Dale Chihuly, certainly the most successful glass artist in the country. Actually, Chihuly is more like his own industry; teams of glassblowers and engineers produce his work for him and install it all over the globe (sadly, the artist lost the vision in one eye in a car accident years ago, forever complicating his ability to personally produce his work).

Chihuly's installations can be enormous, and are best known for making a forceful case for glass in the public square, where stone and steel used to rule the roost.  And they're always popular (I think this is the third major exhibition of his stuff in New England in the past few years), partly because they're remarkably consistent - indeed so predictable that Chihuly now probably counts as a brand.

All this popularity and "innovation" does offer the MFA half an excuse for taking Chihuly seriously, I suppose; the problem is that the style which has won him his international acclaim has varied in only one dimension over the years - it's gotten bigger and brighter. That's the extent of its "development." Small, early "Chihulies" are like bubbles of deeply saturated color bursting before your eyes; later ones are more like megaton technicolor explosions that just won't quit (at left). The idea of a "retrospective" is slightly absurd.

Still, Chihuly takes himself seriously enough; he gives his stuff the kind of classy monikers that the management at the Bellagio (where he runs a gallery) might give to their latest high-end eatery (Chiostro di Sant'Apollonia and Mille Fiori are samples). And he's prone to classifying his works into formal groups, like "Reeds" and "Boats" and "Chandeliers." But basically everything he does, from his candyland landscapes to his giant umbrella drinks (at top), is a happy, splashy blast of vulgarity, and that's that.

And this was Sebastian Smee's mistake - pointing, oh-so-delicately but undeniably, to the Bellagio-level taste of the whole show. Eek! Globe readers don't like that kind of thing; after all, isn't it the Herald that's supposed to be down-market?  And doesn't Smee remember what happened to Louise Kennedy when she described the self-consciously vulgar Huntington show Pirates! as, in fact, self-consciously vulgar?

I guess not.

Still, something tells me Smee will survive the outraged letters I've been reading in the Globe regarding his review. And Chihuly of course can survive any review, anywhere; he'd only be bothered by criticism if he were, in fact, attempting something like art, which he's not. Come to think of it, there really isn't a single aesthetic idea in evidence in his entire show. (Even when this artist calms down for something more "elegant," as in his "Reeds" series, he hangs onto his signature sense of inner vacuum.)

That emptiness is a bit interesting in and of itself - it's quite unusual, really. Master craftsmen generally edge toward art as their skill deepens; their formal concerns begin to coalesce into metaphors in and of themselves; they discover what their work means. But this hasn't happened with Chihuly - indeed, his one stab at connecting with an actual aesthetic (in an odd display of forms based on Native-American motifs) comes off as a weird little detour from the main event.

No, Chihuly isn't an "artist;" he's more like the head of a management team engineering a designer drug targeting your visual pleasure center. He only wants to give you a head rush; the whole show is like a giant tab of lysergic acid. Of course, LSD can be fun in small doses (don't ask me how I know that), and the pleasure center does deliver, well, pleasure - just ask the kids romping through the show, wondering aloud if you can lick the sculptures (really, the docents for this exhibit should have been Oompa-Loompas). You might get a lingering case of retina-burn at Through the Looking Glass, but that's probably the extent of its mental impact - or danger.

Still, I admit that you can't dismiss Chihuly completely, because in the right context, he can truly charm - or better yet, make you laugh; indeed, his gonzo, take-no-prisoners visual giddiness not only throws a goofy kick into all kinds of formal spaces, but seems to draw a kind of virtual content from them.  I know it sounds funny, but while his sculptures utterly fail as statements, they operate quite well as ripostes. In fact they're probably best described as visual raspberries.

If you doubt me, just go up the stairs from the current show and take in his delightful Lime Green Icicle Tower, (at left) which is standing like a luminous spire in the MFA's severe new Shapiro Courtyard.  It's everything the courtyard isn't: a whimsically organic folly (it looks like some mutant anemone in an outsized aquarium), shooting like a firework all the way to the top of a space that in its expensive serenity could pass for a mausoleum.  Indeed, the impossible height of the piece almost operates as a kind of joke; it activates the whole space as a punch line, sweetly skewering the pretentiousness of its own presentation.  You can almost hear it whispering: Oh, come off it, everybody.

Likewise, if you're inclined to think that Ikebana Boat (at top) is some kind of atrocity, just look what happens when you float its twin past the rigid restraint of Chatsworth (at right): suddenly you've got a party.  When I browsed through images of Chihuly's public installations on the web, I saw something like the same effect over and over - just about everything his team comes up with plays as jazzy fun in a public context.  It's only when you isolate it against a hushed, black backdrop, that the work suddenly seems pushy and empty.  So Chihuly doesn't produce art, he produces carnival floats - but are carnival floats such a bad thing?  He may not belong in a museum.  But that doesn't mean I feel like raining on his parade.

Sebastian Smee and the giant penis of money

Koons encounters a potential critic.

I've been thinking of late (again!) about our mainstream press criticism. This was probably brought on by Bill Marx's recent rant regarding Don Aucoin's clueless putdown of Albee's A Delicate Balance. I poked some fun at Marx over this at Art Hennessey's site - after all, Marx's Arts Fuse is hardly The New York Review of Books; it's basically an extension of the educated-middlebrow ethos one finds at WBUR and NPR (and no doubt other 'Rs), the kind of tiny pond Marx can comfortably dominate as BU's best-read poobah.  (Although to fair, when I saw Aucoin's rave today over Patrick Stewart's Macbeth, I thought, "You know, maybe Bill Marx has a point!")

The trouble is that Marx's point doesn't really go far enough - his case against Aucoin is that the Globe's lead drama critic doesn't have much in the way of critical chops - indeed, he points to the paper's film and music critics as examples of the kind of talent it will pay for when advertising dollars are at stake.  I've made that point myself, of course, but I have to say - even if Aucoin did have some intellectual mojo, would that help the situation? In a way Marx doesn't seem to appreciate the real problem at the Globe - and frankly, at the Times, the New Yorker, and most publications that still feature criticism.

Consider, for a moment, the case of Sebastian Smee.  No, he's not a character out of Dr. Seuss or Roald Dahl - he's the Globe's leading visual arts critic.  And unlike Aucoin, he's undeniably knowledgeable, and a very witty writer.  Trouble is, he rarely writes actual criticism - he sniffs at a lot of local art as beneath him (he leaves it to the less-able Cate McQuaid), and is happy to dodge with literate fluff the salient points of an exhibition if they're controversial, and he doesn't see how engaging with them will help his professional ascent.  Smee's best, in fact, at brilliant recapitulations of conventional wisdom, as in his various analyses of Matisse (hedonist or hero?). You've heard it all before, but Smee puts it so much better than you could that it's fun to revisit what you think already.

"What you think already."  That really should be the tagline of the Globe's arts section.  For the paper's writers are hardly engaged with the art they supposedly cover - instead they're engaged with their audience, and what they think that audience can understand and will pay to hear.  In a word, they're mirrors, not windows.  It's true that some of the mirrors are smarter than others - but they turn that intelligence into a sharper picture of their readers, not the art they're supposedly writing about.  Because, in a word, that's where the money is.

Take for example, a recent snippet from Smee about the artist Jeff Koons:

I can't think about Jeff Koons without laughing. He's a living, breathing, ongoing wisecrack. He's revolting of course, but undeniably mesmerizing, and so funny - in ways that make me giggly and nervous, ways I can't ever quite incorporate into a stable critical framework - that he leaves me speechless.  . . . Luxumburg and Dayan, a commercial gallery in uptown Manhattan, has just opened a revival of Koons's "Made in Heaven" paintings [one at top left] kitsch, explicit, hyper-real depictions of Koons enjoying sexual congress with his then wife, the Italian porn star Ilona Staller, otherwise known as Cicciolina. Those paintings were made 20 years ago. (The marriage went sour, and Koons and Staller were subsequently embroiled in a bitter fight for custody of their son.) 

Yeah, that Jeff Koons - what a comedian! He's still trying to profit off of hardcore photos of his son's mother. Who absconded with said son, Ludwig Maximilian (no, I'm not making that up) to Italy, where a court ruled the kid was better off without Koons - who despite being worth millions, then cut off child support. Yup, a laff riot from beginning to end.

And something about that "it's revolting, but it makes me giggly and nervous" line suddenly made me think of Ty Burr - who often strikes precisely the same tone about this or that movie he thinks is "unholy" or whatever.  Oh my God, my Mom would kill me if she caught me with this!  is essentially the message here.  Only both these men are middle-aged, which makes their shared stance a little weird - until you remember that it's their editors' stance; they're being paid to re-iterate (and massage) a key boomer cultural meme: that "real" art should shock Mom and Dad.  And it's only a small step from that to "If it shocks Mom and Dad - then it's art!"  After all, who's to say otherwise, you know what I mean?  (Certainly not the critic!)

This kind of thinking has turned the Globe critics into living, breathing personifications of cultural co-option; they subjugate high culture to pop on their laptops every day, in fact.  And the smart ones do it just like the dumb ones do; they may do it better, more seamlessly and entertainingly - they insinuate between the lines that they know better - but they still do it.

Kind of the way Koons keeps doing it - you'd be hard pressed to see much development in this particular artiste over his thirty-year-career.  Maybe that's what makes Sebastian so giggly!  Although I think I can help him out with "creating a stable critical framework" for Jeff Koons.  And why not start with his chief patron, Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou?  Joannou is behind a lot of bad art (Kiki Smith, Matthew Barney), and is a board member of New York's Guggenheim and New Museum (which he basically financed, and now uses as a springboard for enhancing the value of his own collection, in shows curated by - wait for it - Jeff Koons). One of the few interesting things about Koons's "Made in Heaven" series was that it revealed that, even if his financial assets were enormous, his personal ones were merely average in size; but you have to remember that behind the beaming, physically unimpressive former commodities broker stands Joannou, a gigantic virtual penis of money spewing enormous gobs of capitalist ejaculate over the landscape (a lot of it on Koons).

Want to know more about Dakis Joannou (at left, with Koons and Duchamp, who may in the end be to blame for all this)?  Well, it's kind of hard to find out more - the Internet seems almost scrubbed of data about anything but Joannou's art collection.  But I do know that his country is basically in default - there has even been talk of Greece selling some of its islands to Germany to make good on its debt, which makes said islands an interesting setting for recent art junkets featuring Joannou, Barney and Koons (who also, btw, designed Joannou's $115-million yacht, "Guilty"). I did eventually discover that Joannou is the chairman of J&P Overseas and J&P-AVAX (and that even though these are publicly-traded companies in Greece, his son Christos runs both). J&P's stock is in the gutter, of course - because the firm essentially builds major construction projects and luxury real-estate in spots like the Middle East and North Africa, and thus is wildly over-leveraged.

So Koons is a bit like the happy face pasted on the secretive networks of the global economy (and its resulting meltdowns) - and basically, trying to discuss him without discussing Dakis Joannou is a bit like trying to analyze Michelangelo without mentioning classical Athens or the Catholic Church. Of course, to be fair, it's easier to analyze the Catholic Church than it is to analyze Dakis Joannou!  But without going into some deep economic exegesis, Smee could at least grapple with the fact that, just as Titian and Raphael painted Madonnas for their patrons, so Koons produces imagery that reflects his patrons - thus his outpouring of porn and plastic, and his mania for childish, commercialized satisfactions that repel as much as they attract. Yes, there's a yin-yang between pleasure and horror that haunts his work - but horror of what, exactly? And why should Dakis Joannou recognize in it his own reflection?

But Smee can't answer those questions - because he's inside the post-capitalist bubble too.  None of this can be discussed; that's not his role.  So instead Koons is a "comic genius." Well, I'm not laughing.