Monday, January 02, 2012

MOMA's new photography 2011 same as no photography in any year. No, I'm not naming names of photographers, simply because they aren't. I wouldn't pay the admission to see it, so go on Free Fridays, courtesy of Target. Entry starts at 4:00. It's a rollercoaster of repulsive, prejudice and cult of the personal glitch. You get to see a seventy year old diva, culturally "nekkid" under a black leather jacket, lost in a room with an African-American plaster servant statue; then you're treated to a photographer's idea of her very own "family" of perfect strangers, mostly Hispanic and African American characters in various phases of inappropriate sexual behavior: a clothed mother portrayed with a daughter "nekkid" under a nylon stocking body suit; a woman, "nekkid" straddling a man in the same room as a sleeping infant. Things go from racist to culturally bigoted: there's the usual anti-communist anti-Mao spread serving a new anxious immigrant class of Asian, and a frozenly hostile Greek-English analysis of Turkish society, not easy to misread but enhanced by knowing of the deep enmity between Turkish and Greek cultures. The best of the worst were the pseudo-intellectual expectorations by others: a facile series of shots of cafe' and library details because one consolingly nourishes the body, the other the soul (Must not be the New York Public Library, with its current firings, future closings of Midmanhattan branch and another and the destruction of the consulting Main library building now inscripted five times with the name of an important donor); a series of ceiling bare lightbulb shots and a close-up of a male and female middleaged couple,not traditionally erotic, prone, staring. The titillating implications of sex in experiential bleak exhaustion leave you as nourished as eating frosting from a month-old cupcake would. In this vein of ponderosity, another pseudo artist offers us an unrequested insight in the land of her nightmares, which includes a bare tree with branches screechingly in focus. I mean, tell a therapist. At least you have to pay him or her to listen to you.

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