If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s — say, if you are around the age of the Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, 45 — you may remember the word “problematic” from your long-ago seminar days. Back then it was a voguish noun, borrowed from French, that described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. Soon, though, like so many other efforts to think critically, “the problematic” got left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. These days we encounter “problematic” exclusively as an adjective: an offhand judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker who can’t be bothered by precision.
A whole cast of professional art workers — conservators, designers, guards, technicians — has been roped in to produce “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a small exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It is a title so silly that I cannot even type it; I am cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many worldwide timed to the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially a light amusement following on from “Nanette,” a Netflix special from 2018. In that routine, a sort of blend of stand up and TED Talk, Gadsby riffed on having “barely graduated from an art history degree,” at the bachelor’s level, and attempted a takedown of the Spanish artist: “He’s rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” Now this entertainer has come through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, the joke — the only good joke of the day, in fact — is on you.
Read Full Article »
