Anti-Art Action

At the Guggenheim this summer they shoved a handful of borrowed Picassos into the side gallery you may or may not notice as you venture down the spiral. (You are almost certainly bound to miss it going upward.) In order to find out what I would see in that dark room, I stood in the entry hall, next to what turned out to be not walls but doors, as two workers nearby poked around in a concealed electrical closet. I read only a few short sentences describing Picasso as a man in Paris before I felt a finger poke my shoulder. “Excuse me,” a person representing a group that had ballooned behind me said. “We’re trying to read here.” Feeling rightly guilty, I sped through the narrow hall of context directly into the small exhibit. The small hallway space—and the little time it left to read the introductory text—might explain the aimless nature of those inside the unmapped rooms. Two tween boys posed for their mother in a group photo with Picasso himself, the self-portrait from his Blue Period. I wondered if the tweens had even noticed the sign at the entryway, which might ha…