Dia: Beacon is a bobo Disneyland

I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon, but my wife says it's inevitable. First, I have to say I did enjoy the day at Dia: Beacon. Much of the work, even that which I found to be ridiculous, was thought provoking in some regard. The trip is worth it just to experience Richard Serra's gargantuan rusty steel plate sculptures. However, as we left the center in mid-afternoon, I had to conclude that the space is just a bobo version of Disneyland.

When I say "bobo" I'm using David Brooks' neologism, a contraction of "bourgeois bohemian". We arrived at the center a half-hour after it opened and the place was already starting to fill up with these types, that is to say, Upper West Siders. While certainly not the level of congestion one finds at the Met on a Saturday mid-afternoon, the center did fill with enough people that you were rarely alone in its 300,000 square feet. And glaringly, after leaving multicolored NYC, the crowd was overwhelmingly white.

Disneyland’s thrill resides in the gut, not the mind, and so does Dia’s. Without a Master’s degree in minimalist art appreciation, you’re left to simple emotional reactions to the installations. And most of the installations are about art itself rather than any aspect of the typical person’s life, such as, say, love or death. It seems that by mid-century art had tired of exploring the human condition and turned to navel gazing. The result is the inanity of Fred Sandback’s string sculptures. As an amusement park attraction they work, forming an imaginary pane you hesitate to walk through. But while I was able to sit and contemplate my own reflection in Gerhard Richter’s Six Gray Mirrors I couldn’t help but be reminded of a funhouse mirror. Most exciting are Serra’s arcing steel behemoths. It’s probably the only gallery or museum visit I’ve made where I heard visitors whistling, listening to the echo off the umber walls. People were having fun! Heaven forbid we see that in a Chelsea gallery.

This later lead me to an observation about the rise of photography in the art world that occurred as the artists featured in Beacon descended from their zenith. Photography, by the function of the camera, requires an outward view. The lens must be trained on something other than itself. Even a self-portrait, when viewed, is a view of someone else. It is very difficult for photography to fall into the same self-indulgent exploration the Dia artists followed. Of course, there is an argument to be made that every photograph makes a self-referential commentary on photography, but I think that argument is made by critics and not photographers.