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| Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable BBL Bleu, 1999/2007, as shown at Art Contemporain, La Voie des Arts, Saint-Loubouer, France. LACMA. (c) Jesús Rafael Soto |
LACMA's Collectors Committee had to be cancelled this year. Museum patrons have nevertheless purchased one of the nominated works for LACMA:
a blue Penetrable by Jesús Rafael Soto. It's a variant of the yellow "spaghetti sculpture" that was on loan to the museum from 2011 to 2017, from the collection of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. The yellow
Penetrable became incredibly popular with children, inspiring a spontaneous game of gathering and hugging as many strands as possible.
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| The Soto Penetrable that was on loan to LACMA |
LACMA curator Ilona Katzew says the museum has been looking for a comparable work to buy. Soto produced or authorized about 70 such works from the mid 1960s to his death in 2005. The
Penetrable BBL Blue, conceived in 1999, is the last of a posthumous (2007) edition of 8.
As far as I can tell,
the Houston Museum of Fine Arts is the only other major American institution to have a
Penetrable. LACMA's
Penetrable joins a 1963-64 painting/sculpture by Soto,
Almost Immaterial Vibration, that was purchased by the 2004 Collectors Committee.
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| Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable BBL Bleu, 1999, as shown at Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, 2018-19 |
Comments
Even before before Covid-19, I'd wonder how many microbes were on all those plastic ropes grabbed on by thousands of people, kids in particular. Plastic has a positive charge that tends to attract a lot of germs.
Come to think of it, the guy managing LACMA is like a virus infecting the museum.
It has staying power! Can't wait till Soto's work is up and we can interact with it again.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UD1-oVJlU4M
Talk about two nitwits (not to mention the Board of Supervisors, etc) being out of touch with the public.
No justice, no peace.
The Save-LACMA mob is defending white privilege in the form of the "encyclopedic" museum. Don't be fooled. The Save-LACMA is complicit with the racist structures that led to the death of Mr. Floyd.
I've said it before, but it is even more timely now. The Save-LACMA mob treasures the "encyclopedic" museum, like Trump treasures the border wall. Both are divisive instruments of white privilege.
Recent events have only served to strengthen LACMA's case for dismantling the "encyclopedic" museum. Others have started saying the same thing:
https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/the-us-has-a-problem-and-the-art-world-is-not-helping
Here is the Director of the V&A East on the connection:
"These men who defined the Enlightenment, constructed its hierarchies and categories, these intellectuals who laid out the framework of modern law, morality and its identified metaphysics – looked upon Africa, a well-populated and varied-cultured continent, and saw in its peoples nothing – a void, a cultural tabula rasa – silence. It made colonialism, and the imposition of Western cultural norms, seem like a kindness.
[...] The Enlightenment is the period in which the museum sector was born and alongside it was the intellectual apparatus of race and racism."
https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/news/there-is-a-moment
The Director of the V&A calls for museum professionals to challenge the implicit hierarchies. The response to recent events has bolstered LACMA's case for dismantling the "encyclopedic" museum.