It's fun to shake people up. Emotions are what unite us, Brown asserts, no matter what our nationality. The wonderful aspect of this show is that it's a complement to the atmosphere of the Olympics. This show brings things together. Not only see it but hear it and sense it in ways that have hard-line academic art critics in a lather.
Rings combines visual art with literature and music.
Brown had the thrill of single-handedly selecting the art for Rings, all of which are favorite pieces. The traditional show tries to bring things as near like as possible, so we went at it from the other end of the telescope and purposely brought things together from widely divergent cultures, styles, scales, materials, from 17 feet to three and a half inches, art from the 1990s and going back 7,500 years ago. It's an anathema. If you mention the word 'universal,' you have shown how benighted you are. But this resonance of internationalism and polyculturalism is the spirit of the Olympics.