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

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ARTHUR LUBOW CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

ALFONSO DURAN FOR 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- ’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 “,” 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. When it only titillates, it a kind of hedge maze in which the tradi- loses its claim to be art. tional boxwood has been replaced by re- The crowd-pleasing touring shows of im- flective surfaces. mersive projections of van Gogh paintings, Staring at my bounced-back image, I which have proliferated as vigorously as was reminded of Kusama’s visionary “Nar- sunflowers over the last decade, are to art cissus Garden,” an expanse of mirror balls what military music is to music. Another lying on the ground. (First created in 1966 enterprise, Meow Wolf (why do experien- at the Venice Biennale, “Narcissus Gar- tial art organizations have such terrible den” happens to be on view in a later for- names?), promotes the artistic credentials mat at the Rubell Museum.) But Devlin’s of its immersive installations more credi- work envelops you. Eventually you come bly. Formed in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2008, to a shallow pool, 6 feet wide and 35 feet Meow Wolf recently opened Omega Mart long, where, standing on marked circles at in Las Vegas and plans to inaugurate a the edge, you can raise your arms and see space in Denver this year. Omega Mart re- your reflection as a dendritic filigree and sembles a supermarket with weird sets hear the whooshing intake of breath. and bizarre commodities, all of them Chilled, I felt I was standing by the bank of crafted by participating artists. the river Styx, experiencing not my per- THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021 N C9

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

my hand touched the flowers on the wall, I Superblue Miami accelerated their dying — a caustic com- Opens on April 22 in Miami; 786-697-3405. ment on humankind’s blight, as well as a Tickets go on sale in early April; to be alerted ravishing rendition of the Japanese aes- when they go live, sign up at superblue.com thetic of the ephemerality of beauty. /miami. In 2018, Inoko persuaded Glimcher to break a taboo and charge $20 for admission sonal demise but the death of the planet. to a teamLab exhibition at Pace’s Palo Alto At Superblue, the barrier between the gallery. Pace represents several other art- viewer and the artwork has evaporated, ists whose experiential installations don’t which is the long-stated mission of team- lend themselves to conventional gallery Lab. One way to regard the group’s show- sales: Leo Villareal, Random Interna- stopping displays in Miami is that they al- tional, DRIFT. Pace was marketing their low a visitor to pass through a computer pieces to developers and governments. screen, just as the characters in Jean “They would be placed in shopping malls Cocteau’s film “Orphee” walk through mir- or on bridges,” Dent-Brocklehurst said. rors. “What makes a boundary is the recog- The Superblue alternative model (which nition of one by people,” said Toshiyuki is not restricted to Pace artists) funds pro- Inoko, a co-founder of teamLab, speaking duction of the work and pays royalties to through an interpreter as he tweaked the the artists on ticket sales. A ticket to Su- Miami installations shortly before the perblue Miami costs $36, with a $10 add-on opening. “On a computer screen, once peo- to see an additional teamLab project, ple recognize the screen it becomes a “Massless Clouds Between Sculpture and boundary. We are trying to eliminate or Life,” an audience-tickling creation in soften the boundary.” which clouds of soap bubbles form, hover Indeed, the largest of teamLab’s four ex- and dissipate as visitors walk through hibitions at Superblue Miami is devoted to them. two separately conceived works that have Inoko told me that the cloud is like a vi- been interwoven. “Universe of Water Par- rus, “at the boundary between what is liv- ticles, Transcending Boundaries” is a dig- ing and isn’t living, and organic and inor- ital waterfall that cascades down two walls ganic.” Because of the coronavirus, Su- and onto the shiny floor; coming into con- perblue Miami will initially operate at 50 tact with a visitor’s feet, the stream parts. percent capacity. It is better equipped than Concurrently, another work, “Flowers and a conventional museum to meet that re- People, Cannot be Controlled but Live To- striction. Shantelle Rodriguez, director of gether,” is erupting with huge blossoms experiential art centers for Superblue, that grow and die. The flowers bloom on said, “These artists have a very specific the ground only in those spaces that have idea of the number of people who should be been cleared of the watery image by the in a room to have the experience.” visitor’s presence. For me, the immersive experience be- The teamLab collaborative embraces its gan, not entirely pleasantly, with my trip Japanese heritage most directly in a sin- from New York to Miami, the first time I gle-channel video, “Life Survives by the had been on an airplane in over a year. It Power of Life II,” which transmogrifies the continued with the alarmingly insouciant Kanji symbol for “life” into a tree branch atmosphere in South Beach, where I re- passing through seasonal change in a turned to my hotel one evening to find a dance of 3-D calligraphy. In another room, party of unmasked college students “Proliferating Immense Life, a Whole Year packed as tight as bedded asparagus by Per Year” displays a sequence of rendered the swimming pool. In my discombobu- flowers that grow huge and fly off as petals, lated mood, the trippy, meditative, gor- leaving behind a grid of small gold-brown geous installations of Superblue washed wall squares — an allusion to the gold leaf over me as a respite and solace. My resist- applied to the paper surface of a Japanese ance melted. My doubts subsided. Like the screen as well as (to my mind at least) bare kids in my hotel, after a year of privation I winter fields shadowed by clouds. When was ready to be seduced.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALFONSO DURAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

JAMES TURRELL; ANDREA MORA

Clockwise from far left, top, teamLab’s cloud room at Superblue; the theatrical designer Es Devlin’s immersive environment “Forest of Us”; soap bubbles at the cloud room; an image at James Turrell’s “AKHU”; Toshiyuki Inoko, a co-founder of teamLab; and Devlin in “Forest of Us.”