JOLLY DAYS

Go Go Gehry

Architect Frank Gehry has art-world street cred — an elevated reputation in the club that used to be called the avant-garde, and the richest clients in the world — which means mostly corporations, cultural institutions, or people with corporate-sized pocketbooks. Gehry's work has become iconic in the way that logos are memorable, floating on the sea of the popular culture with a very special sauciness.

In the labyrinth of reputation and theory that is the current art world, Gehry has attempted to mix the expressiveness of Abstract Expressionism, the down-home-materials based aesthetic that is popular among artists who affect populism, and the dumbness of installation art, to create a whole not-so-new vocabulary of exploded forms, using computers to complete the synthesis of aesthetic correctness with all of the above.

Installation art can make the lowliest curator feel that they too are creative. Rather than do the hard work of finding, trying to understand, then trying to express, insights about new work for the public to see and begin to understand, many curators see installation art as an easier route to ego gratification; a way to elevate their own status as collaborators in a faux-creative act that nobody much cares about anyway, but that makes a great cocktail party ice-breaker. Serious curators are left to fend for themselves in their job competition with these flashier manifestations of an honorable profession, somewhat at a loss these days for any leadership.

Gehry has rejected the formalities and embraced theory, big time — as Dick Cheney would say. Still, Gehry has shaken things up, which is a good thing. His career really is about the art world more than about his work, which has been the case with highly publicized artists since Duchamp. Turning a building, a functional space, into an individual expression, is something of a hat trick. The trick being: how did he get the clients to agree to this level of self-indulgence? Why would a corporation or museum want their building to be so exhibitionistic and callous towards its contents and surroundings.

The answer is ego — corporate ego, the ego of corporate leadership. These look-at-me buildings satisfy the type of people who become corporate leaders, and the anonymous boards that seek attention for themselves — all of a sudden, they too are collaborators in art for the ages.

The oddness of the buildings seems somehow to conflate to “individuality” for a corporate mentality. Unconcerned about setting or locale — although there is an incredible amount of airhead rationale for just the opposite — that is, that the works have a meta-relationship with their environment — Gehry's buildings are “smart-dumb” in their self-absorption.

With all that said, I'd go back to what was dropped in earlier — they do shake things up, and that is a good thing.

This review is a smart, clever, somewhat coagulated assessment of Gehry. The writer makes many interesting points:

Thirty years ago Guy Debord defined spectacle as 'capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image'. With Gehry and other architects the reverse is now true as well: spectacle is an image accumulated to such a degree that it becomes capital. Such is the logic of many cultural centres today, designed, alongside theme parks and sports complexes, to assist in the corporate 'revival' of the city - its being made safe for shopping, spectating and spacing out.

””“

It turns out Frank Gehry and director Sydney Pollack are friends — proving once again that all famous people know one another.