Sunday, July 28, 2024

Late Afternoon Light, Stairway of Ca' Rezzonico

This has always been one of my favorite interior spaces in which to find myself in the late afternoon: this image is from just a couple of days ago. But Ca' Rezzonico is always worth a visit, even at a time like this, when it features an exhibition by one of the most consistently awful artists regularly shown (and even celebrated!) in Venice over the last 15 years or so. That's a topic for a later discussion, when I return back to the US, but my gosh, this particular artist might be a wonderful human being, with many admirable qualities (besides having a very famous father), but what always strikes me--even staggers me (sometimes with actual laughter)--is how his work is inevitably and irredeemably unimaginative and vapid--regardless of scale or materials used. I suppose this might be considered something of an achievement in itself: such persistent and indefatigable (though self-important) dullness. He doesn't so much seem to come up with an idea as simply stub his toe against one or another well-worn and widely-and-cheaply-available commodity, as a near-sighted person would bump into one or another mass-produced item in a dimly-lit warehouse packed with Ikea furniture. 

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