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4 FILM REVIEW 10ART REVIEW 14TELEVISION REVIEW A supersize MoMA and Cynthia Erivo marathon for the Calder in shapely tries on Aretha Justice League. symbiosis. Franklin’s shoes. BY MAYA PHILLIPS BY ROBERTA SMITH BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK NEWS CRITICISM FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021 C1 N ARTHUR LUBOW CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK ALFONSO DURAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES TeamLab’s “Proliferating Immense Life, a Whole Year Per Year,” an interactive digital installation at Superblue in Miami, which begins previews next week. Flowers bud, grow huge and die off, accelerated by a viewer’s touch. Getting Up to Your Eyeballs in Art After a year of sensory deprivation, a critic dips a toe into the new, high-powered immersive art center in Miami. Superblue is the blue-chip contestant in the And yet they remain stuck in the gravita- FEELING A LITTLE LIKE Alice in Wonderland Superblue Miami rapidly growing field of immersive art. tional pull of virtual reality: The experi- as gigantic digital images of red, white and Opens on April 22 The popularity of this genre is driven by ences they seek are ones they can record on cream-colored dahlias budded, bloomed contradictory desires, as demonstrated their phone cameras and post on social me- and shattered on the wall in front of me, I kyo, is the dynamic centerpiece of an inau- memorably by the line of visitors in 2019 dia. dithered over what I was witnessing. Is this gural exhibition at Superblue, a Miami “ex- who waited up to six hours for a one-minute The renovated warehouse that Superblue a forward step in the march of modernism periential art center” (or EAC to initiates) stay amid the twinkling lights in Yayoi occupies in Miami is across the street from or a debasement of art into theme-park en- that begins invitational previews next week Kusama’s infinity mirror room at the David a more traditional contemporary art institu- tertainment? before opening to the public on April 22. Zwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourished tion, the Rubell Museum, which reopened at The dazzling floral extravaganza by Backed by the juggernaut Pace Gallery and by their phones and computer screens, peo- the end of 2019 in Allapattah, a commercial teamLab, a digital art collective based in To- Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective, ple yearn for real-life visceral experiences. CONTINUED ON PAGE C8 ANTHONY TOMMASINI AN APPRAISAL James Levine leading the Metropolitan Opera A Shining Legacy Orchestra in 1991. He died on March 9. Clouded by Shame ent, and played with alertness and ease, in that long-ago “Meistersinger,” it was in large part because of Levine’s leadership, James Levine built a great Sachs. A luminous Karita Mattila as young then already of over 20 years’ standing. I es- Eva. The heroic Ben Heppner as Walther, pecially remember Hans Sachs’s soliloquy, orchestra at the Metropolitan who falls for her. And Hermann Prey, a dis- when this generally tolerant character sud- tinguished veteran, as Beckmesser, the denly, angrily bewails the selfishness he Opera but left a trail of scandal. town busybody. witnesses in his neighbors. Levine tapped Yet the star was James Levine. into the mellow harmonic richness and I WAS A FREELANCE CRITIC, but not on duty, It was often like that when he was con- wistful poignancy of the music, almost as if when I attended a Saturday matinee per- ducting during his decades-long reign at the offering Sachs consolation, as if urging him formance of Wagner’s sprawling comedy Met, which ended in ignominy a few years not to lose his faith in people. “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at the ago amid disturbing allegations of sexual Now, of course, it is impossible to ignore Metropolitan Opera in December 1995. abuse and harassment — and then conclu- that it was Levine who was selfish, someone The cast was close to ideal. The elegant sively with his death, on March 9, at 77. who could make you lose your faith in peo- Bernd Weikl as the wise cobbler Hans If the Met Orchestra sounded resplend- STEVE J. SHERMAN CONTINUED ON PAGE C14 ACADEMY AWARD® NOMINATIONS INCLUDING BEST PICTURE 10 BEST DIRECTOR DAVID FINCHER THE MOST NOMINATED FILM OF THE YEAR IS “DAVID FINCHER’S MASTERWORK.” THE TELEGRAPH DIRECTORS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE PRODUCERS GUILD AWARD NOMINEE BEST DIRECTOR BEST PICTURE DAVID FINCHER Ceán Chaffin, p.g.a., Eric Roth, p.g.a., Douglas Urbanski, p.g.a. C8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021 ARTHUR LUBOW Getting Up To Your Eyeballs In Big Artworks CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1 Underlying Omega Mart is a narrative and working-class area west of its former having to do with a sinister corporation, a location in the now-gentrified Wynwood mystery waiting for the visitor to pry out. district. Mera Rubell told Marc Glimcher, When I asked its co-chief executive Ali Ru- the chief executive of Pace, of the availabil- binstein how Meow Wolf differed from Dis- ity of the building when they happened to ney — a question she was well qualified to be seated next to each other at a large din- answer, because she had worked at Disney ner. The structure contains 31,000 square for over two decades — she emphasized feet of exhibition space, with 30-foot ceil- that “Disney’s experiences are pro- ings. It will display installations for a year grammed and there is an expectation or a year and a half before they are trucked about how a guest will move through a land off to other Superblue sites in yet-to-be-an- or an attraction,” while “Meow Wolf is all nounced cities. “That’s something we have about giving our visitors the opportunity to to do to make the economics work,” Mollie design their own experience and choose Dent-Brocklehurst, the London-based co- how deeply they want to dive into the nar- founder, told me on a Zoom call. rative component.” For the inaugural exhibition, Superblue Tellingly, the fantasy novelist George included “AKHU” by James Turrell, the R. R. Martin, whose books were adapted Southern Californian who is an éminence into the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” is grise of the experiential art world. The in- a major investor in Meow Wolf. Omega stallation is what Turrell calls a “ganzfeld,” Mart transposes the Pop Art critique of a German word that denotes the loss of American consumer culture that was ex- spatial perception that occurs in a feature- pressed in Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” less uniform visual field, such as a fog — a witty panorama of commercial prod- whiteout. (As with schadenfreude, ucts, staged in 1961 — to the realm of Ganzfeld has no English counterpart.) In Minecraft. “AKHU” (an ancient Egyptian term that Is it art or something else? A better ques- roughly translates as “soul”) an oblong of tion might be, is it good? Marcel Du- light is projected onto a smooth blank wall champ’s ready-mades, Tristan Tzara’s and tints the room. The color of the light Dada performances, Robert Smithson’s gradually changes. If you climb the black- land art, Tino Sehgal’s constructed situa- carpeted steps toward the threshold of the tions — in innumerable ways, modernist illuminated wall, your sense of where you artists have crossed and dissolved bound- are teeters vertiginously. aries. Turrell’s ganzfelds are not new to me, but Immersive art aims to take that mission “AKHU” provided a useful yardstick to as- further. sess the two other art installations in the Es Devlin, whose “Forest of Us” is part of show. A ganzfeld creates a contemplative Superblue’s first exhibition, has worked as mood in which time slows and space dema- a theatrical designer for 25 years, creating terializes. At the same time, it exposes the celebrated sets for “The Lehman Trilogy,” structures of visual perception (and mis- Kanye West tours and “About Time: Fash- ion and Duration,” the Metropolitan Muse- um’s Costume Institute show last fall. At- In an exhibition, your tending art school in London, Devlin ad- sense of where you are mired the Young British Artists who pre- ceded her, but, she told me in Miami: “I teeters vertiginously. couldn’t get my head around making and selling an object. My natural world was the perception) that make the magic. theater.” In the last five years, she has pro- But why was I resistant to the notion that gressed from creating designs for other a simple spectacle might also be art? Art- artists to acquiring “the confidence to ists have never eschewed showmanship. write a narrative.” Bernini was a theater artist as well as a “Forest of Us” begins with a film of al- sculptor. In one of his plays (a 17th-century most three minutes, in which Devlin de- predecessor of “Miss Saigon” and “Phan- picts branching — bronchi in the lungs, tom of the Opera”), a torrent of water limbs of trees, rivulets into streams. The rushed toward the gasping audience, di- voice-over starts, “Every time I reach a verted by sluices at the last moment. Of fork in the road, I choose both paths,” and course, no one remembers Bernini for his ends, “Can you find it? Go and find it!” At divertissements. We salute “Apollo and which point the screen parts, and the vis- Daphne,” marveling at how a sculptor, us- itor walks through a portal into a maze. ing the intractable substance of marble, With stretched Mylar film on the ceiling, could depict the fluid transformation of a optical-glass mirror on the surrounding nymph into a tree. Art certainly can be en- walls, and winding paths bordered by pol- tertaining, but it must also be enlightening ished aluminum dividers, “Forest of Us” is or disorienting.

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