See Tokion’s Creativity Now conference collateral. Someone’s high on Olafur Eliasson, and it’s not just me.

The New Museum of Contemporary Art features similar architectural graphic design in cast prismatic acrylic. Hmmm….

Holland Cotter’s review of Olafur Eliasson‘s show (nytimes.com, April 18, 2008 ) at the MOMA and PS1 includes elegant observations.

Eliasson’s art is highly perceptual, often involving optical illusions, so the viewer’s task is refreshingly straightforward. Cotter explains:

…like certain kinds of jazz, or ragas, or New Age ambient sound, this is an art of variation rather than destination. It lays out a visual theme, then asks you to wait, watch, wait some more and discover things happening.

Check this out. Poke your head in here. Slow down.

I think viewer-centered experiential art can be very generous to viewers, but Cotter susses out a nuanced indifference:

Like abstract painting, Mr. Eliasson’s art can be slow to reveal itself. In an installation called “Beauty” a rainbow emerges from a curtain of mist and vanishes. Maybe you see it; maybe you don’t.

I really enjoyed Eliasson’s show at the SFMOMA. First, I was proud that a the first retrospective of such an important contemporary artist was organized in our home city. Second, it was a surefire crowd-pleaser. The exhibition reminded me of San Francisco’s Exploratorium—light, color, play, wonder—but where the Exploratorium is dark, whirring, and a little musty and nostalgic, Eliasson’s show was bright, contemplative, straight as an arrow.

It’s a fun, pleasurable show, that appeals directly to audience members, regardless of what they think of or know about contemporary art. I can’t remember the last time I could whole-heartedly endorse a show for artists and non-artists alike.

Still, Cotter’s a professional, and he offers one more insight:

A fair amount of his work, in a witty way, is about disruption and disorientation. Rooms tilt; doors are not doors. At P.S. 1 a waterfall flows upward; a rotating metal fan, propelled by its own wind power, swings from a cable, just above head height, in MoMA’s atrium. This is art that teases and even, a little, humiliates, as we hesitate before the false doors, or are blinded by flashing lights, or duck the buzzing fan.

That hint of not-niceness is a crucial ingredient in Mr. Eliasson’s audience-pleasing art. It keeps it from being too sappy or flashy, all disco balls and special effects.

Maybe Cotter’s petting makes the following slap sting so much more:

And how radical is Mr. Eliasson’s art? How market-challenging or expectation-shifting? In the end — so far — not terribly. “Take Your Time” looks anomalous enough in an object-fetish moment…. At the same time the work is too intent on appealing to our appetite for passive sensation and too readily adapted to corporate design….

The writer goes on to contrast Eliasson’s enchanting work with directly political work associated with PS1’s “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution.”

I believe good art is good art, regardless of politics. So when Cotter says that

In others ways, though, [Eliasson’s show] reminds us how far in the current decade art has not come.

I am skeptical of the validity of this criteria for judging an exhibition. Certainly contemporary arts should consider the political implications of their positions, but the prospect that art exhibitions — particularly individual shows — are barometers of political progress is a little frightening. As an individual artist, my thinking may be self-centered or conventional here, but I think progress can be measured with more quantitative data in the galleries neighboring Eliasson’s shows — namely, displays from museums’ permanent collections.

In a 2001 interview on Fresh Air with Terri Gross, trumpeter and producer Quincy Jones discussed “Soul Bossa Nova” (1962).

This iconic tune (the theme for the Austin Powers movies) may seem kitschy today, but imagine its original context in the early 1960s: the Civil Rights movement, modernism’s internationalism, its embrace of the avant garde… Jazz was not the high-brow classy thing we think of now, but it was cutting edge, dangerous. It conjured nightclubs, interracial relationships (oh my!), critiques of segregation.

Jones described the song’s origins: on tour with Dizzy Gillespie in Brazil, the audience members included teenaged Antonio Carlos Joabim and Astrud and João Gilberto. History was made with this meeting: it inspired “Soul Bossa Nova” and, according to Jones, Joabim’s ground-breaking bossa nova tune, “Desafinado,” is “pure Dizzy Gillespie.”

I was surprised to learn that a major cross-cultural exchange by artistic legends was facilitated by the U.S. government: the tour was sponsored by the State Department.

Artists as cultural ambassadors? Seems so progressive! Today’s politicians view the arts with so much suspicion. Why can’t we have politicians as fervently vocal in their support of contemporary arts and culture as the Guilianis of the world are in their opposition to it?

I’m interested in how the work of art mediates a relationship between the artist and the viewer, akin to Lewis Hyde’s idea that a gift is not just a transference of possessions, but a method of forming a social bond. Naturally, I’d seek to clear this bond of obstructions, which unfortunately, can be viewers’ lack of receptivity.

When viewers haven’t accepted the legitimacy of contemporary art (or even modern art) their tone can be “smugly dismissive,” as art critic Kenneth Baker pointed out a few weeks ago, because as political beings they “dread the stigma of ‘elitism.'”

This dismissal is all too real. At last year’s SECA show at the SF MOMA, a visitor cruised by a contemporary sculpture made of cinderblocks whose broken faces were covered in a graphite-colored glitter (the artist arranged the use of a rooftop from which to throw blocks into a vacant lot).

Hardly pausing to look at the art, the visitor declared her dismissal: “My three-year-old could make that.” To further emphasize her point, she added, “Any three-year-old could make that.”

The viewer’s hostility, I think, reveals her fear of being “had.” While postmodern art can be jokey and upset expectations (about the boundaries of art), I think the viewer’s suspicion that the joke is on her, personally, is revealing.

In “April Fool! The Purpose of Pranks” (NYTimes.com, April 1, 2008), Benedict Carey writes:

“As humans, we develop this notion of fairness as a part of our self-concept, and of course it’s extremely important in exchange relationships,” said Kathleen D. Vohs, a consumer psychologist at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Vohs and her co-authors, Roy F. Baumeister of Florida State University and Jason Chin of the University of British Columbia, propose that the fear of being had is a trait that varies from near-obliviousness in some people to hypervigilance in others.

The museum visitor may suspect that artists are playing a joke on her, and that her hypervigilance (or cynicism) protects her from being “had” by fraudulent artworks. Common wisdom (“my three-year-old could do that”) is an anti-intellectual’s response. Even without knowledge of contemporary art history, a little bit of receptivity and curiosity might lead one to consider, Why would an artist would throw bricks off of a rooftop into a vacant lot? Why would she cover the broken faces in glitter? Doesn’t it resemble a man-made geode? What does it mean to take a common material and make it look like a semi-precious stone?).

In fact, many artists use humor or pranksterish tactics to make their work more accessible; to help audiences put aside their fear of contemporary art and engage more fully with the art experience. To paraphrase artist Jason Kaligiros, “Humor is the invitation, but it’s not the party.”

What most skeptical viewers don’t know is that much postmodern art acknowledges the role of the viewer. Without the viewer, I believe a work of art comprises an incomplete circuit.

Carey writes:

…practical jokes are far more commonly an effort to bring a person into a group, anthropologists have found — an integral part of rituals around the world intended to temper success with humility. And recent research suggests that the experience of being duped can stir self-reflection in a way few other experiences can, functioning as a check on arrogance or obliviousness.