Celebrity, the mass culture staple, is the product on offer at two uptown museums. Installed by theatrical designer Robert Wilson amid stretched gauze and taupe rugs on the famous Guggenheim spiral ramp, the Armani exhibition is the first costume show the museum has mounted. It's a profoundly conservative affair. It's a bust because it's bad for fashion. Fashion is artistically valuable for its frivolous, evanescent and mercurial soul.
Art museums are valuable because they're serious, consequential and durable.
The revolution supposedly came when he made men's clothing sensual and body-conscious and put women in their own versions of this new male attire. Tucked into a couple of the Guggenheim's small side galleries is a modest show of Russian painting from the teens and '20s. The awkward compositions are marked by inventive details, such as dust streaked by fingers on the swollen back of a lute, or a symphony of different tones of light-reflective copper. Some are monumental. Others are more diminutive.