BY LAUREN LICATA
If you haven’t yet made it out to MOCA‘s Art in the Streets, think twice before going based off of its advertisement as a “street art retrospective.”
As a whole, the exhibition lacks a clear exhibition catalog or map, exists without any sort of coherent spatial organization, and places faulty emphasis on its composition of “street art.”
Its ability to impact visitors is based upon enormity and celebrity alone, capitalizing upon the recent urban art trend with little else to offer.
We’ll say it up front- if you’re looking for a glowing recommendation, Shelley Leopold’s version in this week’s LA Weekly should do the trick.
While Art in the Streets does deserve recognition as perhaps the largest institutionalized display of graffiti and urban art to date and Jeffrey Deitch certainly deserves acknowledgement for the prominent names brought together under one roof, the exhibition fails to submit any sort of insightful or reflective dialogue, with the exception of a microscopic timeline and vacuous wall text.
The show offers no historical context and imparts nothing at face value.
Colossal names and expansive art groupings provide considerable examples of the urban movement’s visual language, but their significance goes unexplained, leaving novice viewers an assortment of historical imagery alone, and even intermediate attendees the unaided task of piecing it all together.
Taken as a whole, the show embodies the “Tumblr” of museum exhibitions- a collection of pretty pictures, a vague assertion of their significance, and minimal content. Bottom line, don’t expect to leave this exhibit more knowledgeable than when you came in.
