Hannah Gadsby Has 2015 Brain
Picasso notes app apology when? Also: Taylor Swift dates an Edgelord
Hannah Gadsby is back! Now you can watch clips of Nannette on loop in the opioid-funded halls of the Brooklyn Museum. That’s right: “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby” opens today.
In the weeks leading up to the opening, there has been reporting about the ties to the Sackler’s (“every billionaire is fucked up” Gadsby said in response) and general buzz about Gadsby, who for reasons both understandable and oft overstated, has become a poster child for a particular type of, dare I say, cringe.
Now the show is open, the critiques are coming in, and it seems to be sparking a very different sort of conversation than perhaps designed, albeit a more timely one than the intended “bad man did good art: what now?” as questioned through “comedy.” Instead, it seems the reception to the show and the resulting conversations seem more about what enabled the rise of this type of supposed art criticism—the kind that is force-fed, foie-gras style, with the stylings of early aughts critique, that center almost entirely on looking at legacy and “complicating it” with autobiography, i.e. reminding everyone vociferously and with no small amount of smugness that well actually, your hero wasn’t so great—and whether there is a place for it anymore. Why now? Why this? It feels beyond dated. Why not just talk to Nan Goldin?
In an excruciating but very good review of the show for the NYT, Jason Farago writes,
Like the noun-turned-adjective “problematic,” this new exhibition backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture. At the Brooklyn Museum you will find a few (very few) paintings by Picasso, plus two little sculptures and a selection of works on paper, suffixed with tame quips by Gadsby on adjacent labels. Around and nearby are works of art made by women, almost all made after Picasso’s death in 1973; finally, in a vestibule, clips from “Nanette” play on a loop. That’s the whole exhibition, and anyone who was expecting this to be a Netflix declension of the Degenerate Art Show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as ritualized scapegoat, can rest easy. There’s little to see. There’s no catalog to read. The ambitions here are at GIF level, though perhaps that is the point.
The whole piece is excellent and worth reading in full, but I especially loved the focus on what the word problematic means—or crucially, doesn't mean.
The thing about “problematic” is that it’s a hot potato. You need not describe. You need not be precise. When you deploy the problematic, you just throw it in the general direction, and trust me, it’s gonna stick for someone.
I’m writing a lot more about this phenomenon and my relationship to it (please still read what I write in 2-3 years, thanks) so I will keep it brief here. My point is, Nannette the special came out at a time when this shit was popping off. I don’t think Gadsby was prepared for the type of reception or fame that came with it. Nanette rode a wave: whatever your feelings on the special, that’s irrelevant. It was buoyed by a current in time, one that wanted that. It popularized a sentiment that personal distaste for someone or their legacy was a stand-in for substantive critique, that “complicating” a difficult creator meant listing their sins and holding it up to the light, squinting at it, looking back at the art, seeing if some sort of optical illusion on what to do with these people emerged. It often implied that feminism meant doing this arduous, front-line work of separating the art from the artist, like pulling gum off the bottom of your shoe. I mean, saving lives.
And now, years later, Gadsby is still humming the same tune, and finding (or not finding) that it sounds…dissonant. That cacophony…it’s not the sound of the glass ceiling breaking, it’s the early aughts zeitgeist shattering! Run for the hills!
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