[Rick Mullin]

Any thoughts on this Picasso exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum? I'd rather put this in the General Talk thread than bury it in Art....

[Roger Slater]

Why don't you start us off with your own thoughts?

I'm in basic agreement with the article. Lots of artists are shitty people, and lots of wonderful people are shitty artists. Gadsby has anointed Picasso as the Ultimate Shitty Person, mostly for the way he treated women, and therefore thinks that anyone who is moved when standing before Guernica is betraying the cause of gender equality. (I wonder if she thinks that Picasso was the only chauvinist whose painting have made it into museums? I don't know much about art history, but didn't Gaugin abandon his wife and move to Tahiti? Lucky for him that Gadsby decided to make Picasso her target).

When I watched her original rant against Picasso, I knew she wasn't a deep thinker.

[Rick Mullin]

I agree with you, Roger. Among other things, attacking Picasso as a monster to women is not breaking any new ground. And the line forms at the rear for artists who have been abusive to women. The list of antisemitic artists is unnerving. Etc.

What disturbs me more is the idea of launching an exhibit with the express purpose of deriding the artist and mocking the art from a narrow perspective. Such an exhibit was launched very successfully in Munich in 1937. But we live in a time when people visiting New York City, say, go the "immersive" van Gogh or Monet light shows rather than to the museums with the actual paintings. The Brooklyn Museum will pack 'em in for this one. There is another Picasso show at the Guggenheim right now--the young Picasso in Paris. Sounds better. As for the herding effect that this kind of exhibit promotes, I always refer to Tom Wolff's "The Painted Word". The average visitor to a museum is highly susceptible to the instruction on the plaque next to the art. These days there are also x-rays. But I'm rambling now.

[James Brancheau]

It's disgusting. Cheap, and shameful. But, this, of course, is an inevitability. Comedians could have told you this was coming some years ago when they found they could no longer play colleges. Makes me want to trigger someone in the worst way.

[W T Clark]

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I guess I'll have to take your word for it.

[Rick Mullin]

Here is the Times follow-up. The museum's line on this exhibit is truly pathetic.

[W T Clark]

Rick, you have met the person who has read all their free article all the time: the most, unfortuntately paywalled person in the world! Is there any chance you could copy and paste the article(s) into a comment?

[Rick Mullin]

I will try to do so later, Cameron.
RM

[Julie Steiner]

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:

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.

[Rick Mullin]

But what about art being treated in this manner, Julie? The exhibition, including the work of other artists, is manipulative. And a great many people will take its clumsy message as instruction. Let comedians be as crass as they wanna be. I'm all for it. But, again, curating an exhibit of art at a public museum to assign that art a tag such as misogynist or Entartete does a shameful disservice to the public, especially an American public that is dumb enough about art to begin with with. If this is the best way the Brooklyn Museum can think of to ignite an interest in art, then Brooklyn as a borough has finally bottomed out. It's about time. More likely, and obviously, the museum disregarded any charge it has as a home to a great public collection in order to boost admissions with a sensational event. And let's be honest--Hannah Gadsby has a huge platform for what she has to say, clearly knowing and understanding little, about art. But don't get me wrong. I like dick jokes. My middle name is Dick. And I'm very happy that my latest painting features a female nude painted from an "art postcard" I bought on Bleecker Street when I was a kid. It would offend Picasso.