Maurizio Cattelan’s retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum and “Carsten Höller: Experience” at the New Museum were two of the most ambivalently reviewed exhibitions of the year. But you wouldn’t know it from the crowds they’re drawing.
On Thursday, the New Museum announced that its Höller exhibition — frequently described as an “art amusement park” and featuring a three-story slide, a sensory deprivation tank, and a mirrored carousel — is the most highly attended show in the institution’s 35-year history. Earlier this week, the New Museum even raised its general admission ticket price from $12 to $16 to help pay for the extra staff needed to shepherd the larger-than-usual crowds through the show. (The spike is, in all likelihood, only temporarily, according to a spokesperson.)
Uptown, the Guggenheim has extended its hours to accommodate the round-the-block lines for its Cattelan exhibition, which hangs the Italian provocateur’s complete artistic output on ropes from the atrium ceiling like so many sausages in a butcher shop. (The museum will remain open for an additional two hours, until 7:45pm, on Mondays and Tuesdays until the show closes on January 22.)
The success of both exhibitions is all the more notable because of the tepid reviews they garnered. By and large, critical feedback was more negative than positive, and in some cases tantamount to a complete and utter pummeling. Of Cattelan, the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl wrote: "He doesn't make art. He makes tendentious tchotchkes." Other critics, such as the New York Times’s Roberta Smith, were more measured, but questioned the wisdom of such a gimmicky display: “Whatever their strengths, the individual works are radically decontextualized and diminished in this arrangement.”
Carsten Höller didn’t fare much better with reviewers. New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz called the show “arty junk food,” while the L Magazine’s Paddy Johnson noted, “‘Experience’ is more about emptying your mind than it is about contemplating a specific philosophical question, so the kinds of conversations the show tends to inspire will more often revolve around the work than delve into its meaning.” (Of course, there were some positive reviews in the mix: Jerry Saltz loved Cattelan's show, and Charlotte Higgins of the Guardian took Höller quite seriously.)
In the end, however, it was the lack of complex meaning, as well as the absence of formal pith, that seems to have critics disappointed with one or both of the exhibitions. A fringe benefit to these shortfalls is the absence of the standard intimidation quotient that so often accompanies high-profile museum shows. (The same fear of incomprehension that prevents us from going to the gym because we doesn’t know how to use the machines.) Of Höller, Saltz wrote: “The show packs the house; viewers feel pleased with themselves for ‘getting it.’” Schjeldahl took similar issue with Cattelan. “We should get the joke in a flash and then, like Little Jack Horner, after pulling out a plum, congratulate ourselves,” he wrote. “The goof is all. Its form is arbitrary.” Maybe critics dislike these kinds of shows precisely because they are a concession to mass appeal — Roberta Smith called the Höller a "funhouse of participatory claptrap."
This, of course, is not the first time critically maligned shows — particularly crowd-pleasers branded “simple” — have broken attendance records or drawn big crowds. (Think Tim Burton at MoMA in 2009 and “The Art of the Motorcycle” at the Guggenheim, in 1998.) A review seems to play a different role when the art itself can be — at least superficially — experienced in the same way by everyone. One doesn't need to know the term "relational aesthetics" to quickly understand that the Höller and Cattelan exhibitions do not demand the same kind of context and background that MoMA's de Kooning retrospective does.
Perhaps, as relational aesthetics — that is, participatory art — becomes more central to museum programming, critics are becoming less influential in determining whether or not visitors will attend a show. The point of relational aesthetics, after all, was to take art off of the pedestal and make ordinary social interaction central. If viewers can literally experience a show for themselves, do they need to rely on a critic as much as they would if the artwork were something they felt less comfortable with, something they felt needed to be explained in order to be understood? We don't need critics to tell us that slides are fun.
There’s really no way to determine how many people visited the New Museum and the Guggenheim in spite, because, or regardless of the negative reviews. But the extraordinary public response to both exhibitions makes one thing clear: despite its obtuse-sounding name, relational aesthetics is quite a relatable concept, and crowd-hungry museums are likely to take note.