Refik AnadolsUnsupervisedis a crowd-pleasing, like-generating mediocrity.
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The whole thing looks like a massive techno lava lamp.
This isRefik AnadolsUnsupervised,some cross between relaxation exercise and euphoric TED Talk and NSA levels of data mining.
Its a smash success.
Thats 138,151 records, according to the museum, freely available on GitHub.
These are interspersed with sequences that look like charts, diagrams, waves, and other amorphous stuff.
It all adds up to a narcotic pudding.
Unsupervisedis mildly entertaining for whole minutes at a time.
There are chairs and couches strewn in the lobby.
you’re free to lounge and look.
Its comforting, really.Unsupervisedhas the virtue of not disturbing anything inside you; it triggers no mystery.
With all due respect to Kuo, it has neither dreams nor hallucinations and takes away arts otherness.
In this hypercontrolled, antiseptic setting, art and doubt maintain separate bedrooms.
Its like looking at a half-million-dollar screensaver.
These days, works likeUnsupervisedtravel the biennial and museum circuit.
A morphing Anadol was the backdrop for this years Grammys.
Its spilled into public space.
Witness Anish Kapoors shiny silver bean shape squashed under a starchitect building in Tribeca.
It isnt sculpture as much as a schlocky foyer for the super-wealthy who live above.
Already, people stand around it and take selfies.
People gather, gawk, brandish their phones.
Anadol talks in a curatorial mumbo-jumbo about meaningful and cutting-edge data visualization techniques that can have healing power.
He says people have been moved to tears by his work, asking him for hugs.
This messianic blather about making the world better for people echoes the language of Silicon Valley.
Anadol wants to create poetic algorithms for new meditative experiences in the metaverse.
He should work at Facebook.
The problem is not museums bringing new art, technologies, and audiences into their institutions.
Museums took a huge attendance hit from COVID.
We should not begrudge an institution that feels pressure to offer easily digestible digital merriments alongside its traditional fare.
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