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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The Andy Warhol retrospective, which began in Berlin last year and has just opened at the Tate Modern, in London, demonstrates a number of interesting things. The first is that Warhol, fifteen years after his death, remains a contemporary; the revolution in taste that he set off in 1962, his year of miracles, rolls on. Second, we have reached a point at which it's possible to distinguish between what is good, bad, and O.K. in the Warhol opus. And, third, the Tate Modern, a renovated power plant that opened to ecstatic fanfare two years ago, is a scandalously lousy place for looking at art.
Not even the gorgeous Marilyns and Maos, lit with spotlights, can pierce the oppressiveness of the museum's galleries, which were designed by the Swiss firm of Herzog and de Meuron. The viewer's sensitivity is punished by ceilings that are too high, bunker-thick walls, dingy floors of concrete and unfinished wood, and uniform, rainy-weekend lighting. The building palpably yearns to be, if not a power plant again, something brawnier than the butterfly corral of an art space -- perhaps a neo-medieval hospital or arsenal. The message of the place baffles. Surely, a hatred of art can't have been the architects' motive, though it would explain the effect. I put it down to institutional defensiveness, a puffed-up sense of dignity. (Imagine a Marx Brothers movie scripted by Margaret Dumont.) The museum's much deplored...
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