Our Robot Overlords

Where: American History Museum

When: through May 21, 2017

Evil hackers are everywhere, and DARPA (a defense group that was one of the creators of the internet) hosted a competition in 2014 to find out if computers could essentially protect themselves from harm.

Several groups set up their computers with anti-hacking code, and then stood back and watched them get attacked by malicious software.  The winner of the competition is the computer pictured here, called Mayhem.  I especially liked the head hanging from the chain in the middle.

You'll notice that there's a monitor to the left - that's playing a video of the competition, which you really need to watch in order to understand why you're looking at this thing.

For the sake of human job security, I'm happy to say that Mayhem lost out to human coders later in the contest.

Verdict: Worth a few minutes of your next trip to American History.

The Caliph of Clout

Where: National Portrait Gallery

When: through May 21, 2017

This is the latest in the "One Life" series - a one-room examination of a famous American.  I've been mostly positive in my reviews of previous shows, and I liked this one as well.

Babe Ruth was the first really big baseball celebrity.  He was larger than life, both on and off the field.  This show covers his life, his  career and his legacy - nicely done in a small space.

Only 53 when he died, Ruth is, even today, one of the sport's most recognizable players, and his accomplishments are impressive, even if his biggest records have been broken.

I noticed a "curatorial statement" included in the wall notes - we need more of these!

Verdict: Another fine offering in an informative series.

All About Color

Where: Natural History Museum

When: through May 15, 2017

This is a display on the lower level of the museum, put up by the Smithsonian Libraries.  These are usually in two facing display cases, on either side of the hallway between the restaurant and the gift shop.  Amidst all the hustle and bustle, they usually don't attract a lot of attention, and I have the exhibit to myself.

Color is scientific and artistic, historical and cultural - a little something for everyone.  We have Sir Isaac Newton to thank for the color spectrum, a building block of scientific achievement.  Did you know that peacock tail feathers have no color pigment?  Their appearance is a trick of the light.  That fabulous red-orange Fiestaware color that you don't see anymore?  It contained uranium oxide, which
made it slightly radioactive.  Learn all this and more!

Verdict: A small informative display, worth a look as you head off to one of the other exhibits.

Art at the Postal Museum

Where: National Postal Museum

When: through May 14, 2017

I confess, I wasn't intending to see this show.  The closing date had been earlier, and I just didn't want to spend the time to go over to Union Station in bad weather to see what I thought would be another ho-hum display.

Then, the run was extended, and I had taken a day off to run some errands, and I was able to see it after all, with very little trouble or inconvenience.

And I'm glad I did, because this is a nice little show, featuring art used on stamps.  So really, it's not a stamp exhibit, it's an art exhibit, and that's my thing!

The subject matter is the city of New York, in a variety of aspects (all positive, of course), including the one pictured, which is of Grand Central Station, in all its Art Deco glory.  These are from the Postmaster General's collection, which is on long-term loan to the Postal Museum.

While there, I also saw the inverted Jenny, which is a great rarity - sort of the Honus Wagner baseball card of stamps.  If you have an interest in philatelic history, I'm pretty sure this is not to be missed.

Verdict: Better than I thought - I had considered dropping the Postal Museum from my rounds, but now I think I'll keep going, at least a little while longer.

Lost in the Kusama Whirlwind

Where: Hirshhorn Museum

When: through May 14, 2017

It occurs to me that you really don't want to be an artist with a show at the Hirshhorn right now.  Sure, there's a crowd here, but they're not here to see you.  Who would go to the concrete doughnut and brave the insanity if they weren't going to see Kusama?  Well, me obviously, but almost no one else.

Linn Meyers has a show up now, especially created for the Hirshhorn's 2nd floor, and I walked around to see it recently.  Once I got past the crowds in the inner galleries, I had the place to myself.  Which was great for me, but not so great (I assume) for Meyers.  She's put these line drawings on the walls of the building; they struck me as looking like feathers or hair or fur.  The time and work involved must have been enormous, but it's all to be painted over when the show closes.

And somehow, that makes it worse that the work is getting so little attention.  If something's going to have such a short life (367 days), you'd like it to be really popular.  I'm gong to hope that before Kusama showed up, lots of people saw this.

Verdict: Go see this work before it's gone forever.  And not like those stores that run constant going out of business sales and never seem to close, but for real.

Orchids + Hirshhorn = Why?

Where: Hirshhorn Museum

When: through May 14, 2017

One of the shows I look forward to with eager anticipation is the bi-annual orchid exhibit at the Natural History Museum.  They set up a room full of flowers; it's like entering a different world.  I like to go when it's a particularly unpleasant day; it's like taking an hour long vacation from winter.

This year, for reasons that are unclear to me, the Smithsonian has decided to put the orchid display in the Hirshhorn.  It's in the main entryway, on the shelves depicted here.  The problems with this are as follows:

1. The plants are right in the middle of the hustle and bustle, which means one is not transported to a gentle, spring-like atmosphere.

2. The plants are a mere side-show, especially since the Hirshhorn is now a madhouse for the duration of the Kusama show; these are lovely flowers and deserve pride of place.

3. Although one might think that such a location would be damaging to the plants, it turns out that orchids are not fragile little snowflakes; they are quite hardy - how do I know this?  I read it on the wall notes at an earlier show.   Which brings us to the next problem, which is that there are no wall notes.

I can only hope that next year, I will be able to enjoy this event at Natural History.  Or at the Sackler or African Art - the smaller number of visitors would allow greater enjoyment.  Or at the International Gallery in the Ripley would be a great place.  Or, dare to dream,  maybe there would be a room in the Arts and Industries Building?  Or at the Freer, since it will be open again...

Verdict: Poor plants and poor visitors - deprived of a winter break by a bad location.

Celebrating Ella Fitzgerald

Where: National Portrait Gallery

When: through May 14, 2017

It's the 100th anniversary of Ella Fitzgerald's birth, and a great photograph of her (as well as Ray Brown, Dizzy Gillespie and Milt Jackson) is on display in the "Celebrate" space.  You may recall that this is also the "In Memoriam" space, and if someone famous dies, that person's portrait goes up.  With the celebrity death toll of the last year, you may want to see this sooner rather than later.

Verdict: Great action shot of Fitzgerald, and the expression on Gillespie's face is priceless.

"Scary" Videos at the Portrait Gallery

Where: National Portrait Gallery

When: through May 7, 2017

The Portrait Gallery's first display of entirely video art is up for another couple of weeks, and it's worth a look.  I wouldn't recommend standing in line for hours for it, but it's intriguing in spots.  Of course, I love going to exhibits that are the first, or last or largest or rarest of something, so that's part of the appeal for me.  Your mileage may vary.

A practical consideration: this is mostly in very low light.  You may find it a bit difficult to get your bearings or navigate, so be prepared for that.  There's really no problem with sound bleed-through, as most of the videos have no sound to speak of.

I liked the piece entitled "Reflecting Pool."  It seems to hang suspended in mid-air, which adds a sort of ghostly quality.  You see people's reflections in the pool, but not their actual bodies walking around.  I could see this forming the basis of a dramatization of one of E.F. Benson's spook stories, if he'd written one about a mysterious pool.

If you're thinking, that's all very well, but what I'm really looking for are videos of naked old people, you're in luck!  There's a pair (diptych?) of videos: one man and one woman.  Each is completely naked, mostly just standing and looking at the camera.  It's possible more happens in the part of the video I didn't see, but action doesn't really seem to be the point, so I doubt it.

The piece that I watched the longest was one of the artist holding his breath.  I kept thinking, "He'll exhale any second now," but it turns out, he can hold his breath a good long time.  When he does exhale, it's with a loud gasp, which is rather disconcerting.  I started at the sound, even though I was waiting for it.

The whole show is a bit off-putting in some way that I can't quite pinpoint.  A young visitor who was standing close by described it as "scary."  That's not exactly the word I would use (although it's the title of the post, so I did use it), but it's vaguely creepy.

Verdict: Spooky pool scenes, breathing and not breathing, plus naked seniors - what more can you ask?

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall

Where: Hirshhorn Museum

When: through May 14, 2017

So I signed up for the Hirshhorn newsletter and got a ticket to see the Kusama exhibit as soon as I got the email and as fast as my fingers could click on the link, and last week I went to see it.

Frankly, it's hard to decide what I think about this show.  I find that my experience of going to see it colors so much of my opinion that it's hard to determine what I really think about the art itself.  I've tried to imagine what I would think if this had been just another Hirshhorn show: walk in, walk through the exhibit and leave, but it's such a "phenomenon" that it's hard to do that.

I think I also feel sort of guilty criticizing the work of a mentally ill person, as if I'm just piling on, adding to the misery of her life.  But then I remember that 1) when you put your art on display, you have to be prepared for whatever reactions to it come back, 2) the rest of the world seems to think she's an absolute genius, and the show has been praised high and low and 3) she's never going to read this blog post anyway.  So here goes:

Kusama does work in a variety of media: sculpture, video, performance art, paintings and immersive rooms.  The rooms are the big deal; the other stuff is basically what you look at to pass the time while you wait to get into a room.  And you know what phrase has been going through my head since I saw this show?  One trick pony.  Each room is really a big box.  Her art (pumpkins, penis-shaped sculpture, etc.) are on the floor, and the rest of the box is mirrors - sides and ceiling.  So the art is multiplied in all directions, along with you and whoever else is in the box with you.  Okay, I don't usually stand in a mirror box as part of my daily life, so it was different.  But if you've done that once, it's just the same thing over and over again, with different art.  There are also some boxes that you just put your face in to look at - there are lines for those as well.  Again, it's a mirror effect.

At the end of the show, you go into a totally white room - everything is white: walls, floor, and all the objects in the room.  A guard gives you some brightly colored stickers, and you put them wherever you want in the room.  The idea is that, by the end of the show, the room will be covered with dots (which, along with the pumpkins and penis-shaped sculptures, is a big part of Kusama's art).  That was kind of fun.

If you decide to go, here is some advice:

1. Go during the week.  The lines for each box were impossibly long on a mid-day Friday; I can't imagine how long the wait would be on the weekend.

2. Go as early in the day as you possibly can.  I went at noon, and things were already nuts.  If I had to do it over again, I'd get tickets for the first time available.

3. Realize you'll be standing in line for a LONG time.  You get about 20 seconds in a box, but you easily wait 30 minutes to get to the front of the line.  And there are a lot of lines just to get into the line for the first box.  I waited in a line outside to enter the museum, then in a line to enter the exhibit, then in a line for each box I entered (I went into three of them - there were some I missed, but life is short).

4. Bring something to do while you wait.  This could be a book, a phone, a friend, but you will need a distraction from the prospect of spending upwards of three hours at the Hirshhorn, to spend about ten minutes actually seeing the art.

5. If you don't like crowds, don't go.  I chatted briefly with a guard while I was waiting to go into a box, and I quipped that there were more people in the exhibit at that moment then all of the people I'd ever seen at the Hirshhorn in all of my previous visits.  She said they are expecting to have more visitors in the 12 weeks the show is on than in a usual four year span.

The big winner in all of this is the Hirshhorn.  People have been joining as members (for $250, to get tickets that let you jump the line) in such numbers that the website says they are at member capacity!  They have taken in so much money that they don't have the ability to take in any more!  You can (or at least you could when I visited) also buy a $50 ticket that doesn't give you membership, but let's you jump the line in the show (maybe it's just one line).  No idea if that's still going on.

Whoever got this show and has been promoting it as the "must see" event of 2017 is a genius.  Prior to this, all the news about the Hirshhorn was bad.  Their bubble was a bust; they fired a bunch of docents for being too old; there was some sort of leadership controversy that I can't remember the details of now.  All this is forgotten - the Hirshhorn is the darling of the DC art scene; they've got a show that's a license to print money.

Verdict: The mirrors are doing the heavy lifting in this show that's more about the event than the art.