According to a description on the NSU Art Museum's website, “Happy!” — one of the Fort Lauderdale museum's newest exhibitions — presents “artists who aim to engage the viewer emotionally."
That might be the thinnest premise for an art exhibit: If you are an artist and you don’t care if your work moves people, you should probably hang up your tools. It's unlikely I would've seen it for myself were it not for the murderer’s row of art-world stars on display, including the likes of Takeshi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, KAWS, and Jeff Koons.
Despite such a simple theme, “Happy!” is still thought-provoking. When I go to an art museum, I usually ask myself simple questions: Do I like this? Do I find this interesting? Is this well-made? This time I decided to ask myself a different series of questions: What makes me happy? Am I happy? What does the museum think happiness means?
Looking at most of the works on display, that last question seems easy to answer. Everything is all bright colors and motifs that might seem more at home in a daycare center: flowers, rainbows, candy, birthday decorations. In one room, there are porcelain balloon animals from Jeff Koons, a painting of smiling sunflowers from Takashi Murakami, and two murals by the Miami collective FriendsWithYou made from children's modeling clay, one of which depicts hundreds of Pokémon characters. Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Cavern, an installation where a room is filled with bright, fluorescent objects lit by blacklights as disco music plays on a stereo system, makes a notable appearance.
Takashi Murakami's Open Your Hands Wide, Embrace Happiness! (2010). Private collection; courtesy of Sabsay Gallery Denmark.
© Takashi Murakami / Kaikai Kiki Co. Ltd.
In short, “Happy!” is not a very deep exploration of happiness. The emotions that art provokes in us are frequently more complex and nuanced than conventional happiness, sadness, or anger. This only felt occasionally true of the works on display in "Happy!" When I stepped into the colorful, nightclub-lite space of Cosmic Cavern, I felt nostalgia for the times I’ve spent dancing with friends at music festivals. Two video game installations by Cory Arcangel, a Tetris block frozen mid-plummet and Super Mario stuck on a floating brick, gave me a strange sense of anxiety and apprehension. Yoko Ono’s A Box of Smile delighted me with its clever twist: one peers into the diminutive black box to find not jewelry, but one’s own reflection in a tiny mirror that you can’t help but smile at. There's far more at play here than just generic, big-name brands and department store-grade joy.
There are some satisfying moments of curation. A primary color-heavy Rothko painting, though not particularly interesting on its own, is placed next to a work by Alma Thomas of the Washington Color School. The juxtaposition of a lesser-known, black female painter next to one of the giants of abstract expressionist painting is very admirable. But for the most part, you get the sense that the curators are making certain assumptions about their audience: That they must not be very emotionally sophisticated, that they’re not very deeply educated on art, or that they’re actual children experiencing fine art for the first time.
FriendsWithYou, Unified Field II, 2019.
Courtesy of FriendsWithYou
This is the biggest problem with "Happy!": Because the art is presented so simply, the exhibition often fails to acknowledge or contextualize certain realities of the artists’ lives. There are three works by Keith Haring, but the artist’s death by AIDS and the immense toll the disease took on the New York art scene he and Scharf emerged from are reduced to mere mentions. The second Murakami work on display is a Louis Vuitton purse, created in a 2007 collaboration between the artist and the luxury fashion house. It’s briefly described as an “avenue to spread his message” about consumerism, but it might also be seen as a surrender, albeit one considered creative at the time, to the forces of commerce that artists so frequently contend with.
If there’s any message an onlooker should take away from “Happy!,” it’s that things are not always as simple as they seem, and a smile can mask something else entirely.
"Happy!" Through July 5, 2020, At NSU Art Museum, 1 E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale; 954-525-5500; nsuartmuseum.org. Admission is $12 for adults, $8 for seniors and military, $5 for students 13 and older, and free for NSU students and children 12 or younger.
"Happy" - Google News
November 14, 2019 at 09:00PM
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Things to Do in South Florida: "Happy!" at NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale November 14, 2019 through July 6, 2020 - Miami New Times
"Happy" - Google News
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