Wednesday, March 5, 2008

EXUBERANCE!



On my morning dog walk, I rounded the corner of 90th and 5th to find this vibrant new sign advertising the upcoming show at the Cooper Hewitt. Having decorated my room as a teenager with these kind of posters, I’m a sucker for pyschedelia, but what really struck me about the display was the word “exuberant’ in the exhibition title. In fact it stopped me in my tracks because it’s not only a word that’s rarely used these days, but a quality that seems less and less evident in art and life today. And it's missed.


One block later as I was passing the Guggenheim Museum, a Spanish tourist was energetically launching herself in balletic leaps in front of the building making me wonder if an exuberance epidemic had broken out. Then a few steps later I looked up to find this giant hanging of a detail of Ernst Kirchner’s “Dancers” promoting the Guggenheim’s “Berlin to New York” show.




If this weren’t enough, my last stop of the morning was at Keith de Lellis’s new gallery on Madison Avenue where I was struck by this underwater portrait which turned out to be an Art Kane of Sonny and Cher from the early 70s.

So the question I was left with was: is exuberance all around and I was just missing it, or did I momentarily fall into some Bermuda Triangle of exuberance? (FYI – a quick journey around Chelsea in the afternoon yielded no exuberance sightings.)

4 comments:

Joanna Goddard said...

what a funny post! exuberance is fabulous, but i think you did stumble upon a bermuda triangle....things seem a bit slow paced and laconic around here these days....xoxo

ps. excited for the marcel dzama opening tomorrow night, though! there will be some exuberance. my friend just got a dzama tattoo, in fact:
www.joshuadavidstein.com

Molly Stevens said...

Wouldn't you say the problem is the hipoisie?

For them (it?), exuberance is naive. Somehow it's cooler to not be into anything. Except ironically, like porn.

I guess another problem is that exuberance is fleeting by nature.

Alice Olive said...

Very funny! I love the word - and no, I don't use it or see enough exuberance. Maybe I should open my eyes more!

PS Love the shot of Sunny and Cher.

The Design Bazaar said...

This is so great! Your blog is so interesting and spontaneous!