Accessing
the Brooklyn Museum's webpage for the exhibit is free. (And
The Guardian will let you read
its coverage of the exhibition after merely making you feel guilty for not supporting independent journalism.)
I don't think there's any harm in giving this outrageous perspective a few months in the sun. Picasso will remain Picasso. And at least some people who might not otherwise see any reason to foot in an art museum will come for the crass, controversial humor, but while there will find that they enjoy other attention-worthy and life-enriching art (and, ahem, perhaps more nuanced, rigorous scholarship) to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. That's a good thing, isn't it?
Devoting so much attention to the misogyny of a male artist does still keep the spotlight on that male artist. But this exhibition also features lots of works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women artists who are less familiar to the public. (Although not artist
Françoise Gilot, mother of two of Picasso's children and later the wife of Jonas Salk; Gilot died last week at age 101.)
Personally, I think offensive humor that makes us re-examine our assumptions is, by and large, a healthy thing, even if its existence sometimes promotes viewpoints that I think are poisonous. I don't see much difference between barring crassly misogynistic comedians from university campuses and barring crassly feminist comedians from museums.
My main objection to offensive humor (from anywhere on the socio-political spectrum) is that it too often relies on shock value rather than on cleverness. "It's funny because [taboo word]!" and "It's funny because [confirmation bias]!" isn't enough to float my boat no matter what angle it's coming from, and the snippet I heard on the museum website of Gadsby's audio-tour of the exhibition just wasn't all that insightful or amusing:
Quote:
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I'm a comedian, and I'm not a curator, or a critic. I do like to criticize, however. But only through the medium of dick jokes. It's okay if you don't enjoy this. Some people will, others won't, but I think we will all live to fight another day. Except Picasso. Because he's dead. Dead dead dead. He died in 1973, aged 91.
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