As an art museum, the Guggenheim bores me. As a building, it’s spiral construction is inspiring. The current exhibit by James Turrell turns the best part of the Guggenheim into a new piece art. You walk into the museum’s atrium and, where one would normally be standing at the base of a wide spiral walkway, are suddenly at the base of a color volcano. You look up into this psychedelic dome slowly changing colors.
The New York Times called it seductive, blissful, brilliant, and gorgeous:
“Aten Reign” can make you feel a bit like Richard Dreyfuss on the verge of vindication in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”: it sometimes suggests the underside of a giant spaceship setting down.
But The Financial Times panned it:
The central spectacle of the Guggenheim portion is “Aten Reign”, a psychedelic re-imagining of the museum’s corkscrew rotunda. Its hallucinatory glow is hypnotic at first, but with each colourful pulsation, the wonderment diminishes, from ooh to huh to meh. … this glowing trickery feels both ubiquitous and tired. The projections resemble pages from the optical illusions books sold in museum gift shops. The LED-powered procession of luscious colours has become a cliché of architectural décor: skyscrapers do it, trendy bars do it, and so does a long, lit tunnel at the airport in Detroit.
Apparently these people agreed with the FT…
