As a follow-up to my posts from Sep. 23 and Jul. 24 about the Chanel Mobile Art exhibit, here is a link to a review in today's New York Times, "Art and Commerce Canoodling in Central Park" by Nicolai Ouroussoff. The exhibit opened yesterday.
It's a quite critical review. He compares the unfortunate timing of this installation during an economic crisis to the similarly poor timing of the opening of the Rem Koolhaas designed Prada store in SoHo just 3 months after September 11th. Ouroussoff is mostly respectful of Zaha Hadid (the architect of the structure) but pretty much pans the artwork inside as "completely mundane: tame clichés laboring to be provocative" and the concept by Chanel as "a cynical marketing gimmick". He sums it up as a visit into "...a black hole of bad art and superficial temptations, straying farther and farther from the real world outside..."
It's an interesting perspective and I think the review deserves a read. It makes some good points about our often pretentious and materialistic society. But anyway, I'm still going!
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