Meta Manhattan

A Metta Prayer, Jacolby Satterwhite’s Great Hall installation at the Metropolitan, is the museum’s second such commission. In the first, Kent Monkman made a critical intervention about nineteenth-century European painting with two large canvases that foregrounded the barbarity of colonialism. Like Monkman, Satterwhite incorporated his own image into the commission. The multichannel video work features digital clones of Satterwhite and a band of collaborators, as well as scans of objects drawn from the museum collection—all coexisting in a video-game rendering of an alternative New York City.

The relationship to the Met itself is not pictorially clear. Egyptian jars or a terra-cotta Cypriot horse heads easily get lost in the visual clutter of voguing cops, ultralite kink, and glitchy cityscapes. Nor is the Metta of the title a play on the museum’s name (or on Facebook’s parent company, for that matter) but instead alludes to a Buddhist prayer of loving kindness. Fittingly, the video captions exude zen-ish positivity, with only semblances of ironic self-awareness (May…