Art Market Monitor

One wonders what the reviews of the New Museum’s Joannou show would have been like without the ruckus about museum ethics because now all judgments will be colored by the overhanging issues. Here’s the Financial Times‘s Ariella Budick on the Tim Burton show at MoMA showing how the art world self-regulates:

This material sits uneasily in a museum gallery. MoMA’s introductory pitch makes the incontestable assertion that Burton “has reinvented Hollywood genre filmmaking as an expression of a personal vision,” but the curators studiously avoid making explicit claims of greatness for him as an artist in other media, surely because they know he’s not. And yet they have relinquished their responsibility to edit or select. They have padded the show with hundreds of amateurish doodles, simulating a 21-gun tribute of the sort usually reserved for giants of Picasso stature. But it’s really just a bloated collection of memorabilia, best enjoyed by diehard fans who, after a weekend binge of Burton DVDs, still require a high-concept chaser.

Tim Burton, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Financial Times)

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