In today’s New York Times, Roberta Smith gives a double review of Anselm Reyle at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, and Bernadette Corporation’s show at Greene Naftali.  As she sees it, the shows define the two extremes of a “fuzzy dichotomy” that appears to exist in contemporary art (at least in Manhattan), essentially between shiny stuff, and cerebral stuff.  Sometimes, of course, the shiny stuff can have intellectual gravitas, and the ostensibly cerebral stuff can actually be slick and condescending.  I usually find myself in discipular agreement with Roberta Smith, but she is too forgiving with both of these offerings.  Of Bernadette Corporation I can’t say much as I haven’t seen the show, but it seems one could look much further (away from fashion!) afield into the array of contemporary art practice to find that which is truly of the no-money-thanks intellectual ilk.  Bernadette Corporation’s work may be mysterious, antagonistic, and unique, but it is also featured in Purple Magazine.

Reyle’s work at Gagosian represents an entrenched formalism (still globally popular in artmaking and art collecting) that has not left Modernism, and that unfortunately believes resolutely in a restricted mode of image and object making that looks dated.  It is the kind of work, that Claes Oldenberg would likely say, “sits on its ass in a museum.”  Now, Reyle apparently embraces criticisms that his work aims for light entertainment.  Smith notes, not dissmively but matter-of-factly, that his product amounts mostly to “exceptional high-end lobby art,” and does not dissapoint in that regard.  But read the following description of a — get this — untitled work of Reyle’s from the Saatchi website:

“Reyle reclaims the cliché and the kitsch to create his own brand of ‘authenticity’, meeting the shifting aspects lifestyle and art industry demands. Untitled reworks Brancusi’s Africanism, creating an exotic ‘primitivism’ in space age funkadelic purple.”

-anonymous Saatchi she-goat sieve holder

My current view, which many I have spoken to find unpalatable and depressing, is that gleaming, superficial, highly expensive to produce work, needs to justify its continued production with some thoughtful, powerful, and updated theory.  Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word (1975), criticized not just the avant-garde, Warhol, deKooning, Pollock, Newman, et al. but the art critical triumverate of Greenberg, Steinberg, and Rosenberg, for having transformed art from a visual experience into the manifestation of theory, writ (usually) large on a gallery wall.  Why haven’t the myriad ingenius critics and theorists since them had the power to diss work like this out of the mainstream?  It’s not that it smacks on Reyle or Gagosian’s part of pandering to sources of what Smith astutely calls “lucre” — which William Tynsdale translated as “filthy profit”, from aishkron kerdos in his version of the Bible — its that work like this further sends the nearly empty word ‘art’ down the gyre of impotence in the face of image, object, and idea making that popular culture (not just creative popular culture, but politics, science, journalism, hobby, and business) generates with astonishing consistency.