The Glow of Money
James Turrell at the Guggenheim is the Daily Pic by Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: His illuminated spaces used to stand for transcendence, but the new Guggenheim project evokes klieg lights and red carpets.
(© James Turrell; photo by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
James Turrell’s “Aten Reign”, a splashy light piece now filling the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is mostly being heralded as a transcendent soul-feast. For me, however, it provides a plangent picture of the sorry state of our culture, obsessed with spectacle and in thrall to the One Percent. Read a full account of these qualms in my Turrell review for Architectural Record, live online now.
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