It's awesome to stand in a room with three rare Vermeers, from three far-flung places on the globe, all at once. Of course, all Vermeers are rare and the logistics for Vermeer and the Delft School are one reason we won't see it in Charlotte. After two or three hours basking in the cool northern light of Utrecht, Delft and Amsterdam, we depart, giving the museum's more southern painters and some of our favorites a reluctant miss. We head instead to another, more northern borough, Camden, to see an exhibition at the controversial Saatchi Gallery that is as inexorably contemporary as the Vermeer et al exhibit is historical. Conceptual it is not.
New Labour is definitely hands-on.
I strongly doubt that New Labour will show in Charlotte, in Brooklyn, or in any museum in America. If it does make America, Liane Lang's video, Masturbation , will also make front page news and instantaneously be censored. Like the current Euro box office film hit Intimacy , featuring nudity and explicit sex, the cruder depiction of Masturbation will probably stay that side of the Atlantic. I'd have to agree. Word play and decals dominate their intricate, oddly inviting surfaces.