5.20.24 — Elevator Music
To pick up from last time on AI, its potential, and its limits, you can practically bathe in MoMA’s lobby video, because Leslie Thornton herself did to kick it off. Visitors will see it first thing and bathe in it, too. Together with past reports on new media in museum lobbies and their implications for marketing museums, it is also the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.
Is the Museum of Modern Art New York’s most relaxing, cuddly museum? It still has art that once shocked the world, from Dada to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—and we can debate another time whether and why they no longer do. 
A rehanging for its 2023 “fall reveal” with rooms apart for black artists and James Rosenquist, with his F-111 covering the walls, does everything it can to restore their shocks as well. Still, not only does it have the best lobby seating in town. It also puts on a show for the seated and standeed alike. A towering, slowly churning projection by Leslie Thornton would calm anyone down.
Thornton’s play with symmetry in new media has stood out in the galleries and art fairs. Here she lay down in torrential rains to feel the torrential bliss. At the same time, a scientist was building a device for detecting the antimatter that bathes the entire universe. His plans unfold on a chalk board in what could pass for graffiti art—and in real life as interwoven, lightly colored strips. Rain accounts for a silvery downpour in the top half of her vertically divided diptych, while the science alternates with a mysterious darker churning just below.
Neither will change your life or change science. Particle physics is well past the point where the discovery of the muon had a physicist asking “who ordered that?” The hunt for antimatter, important as it is, cannot bring back the urgency of the hunt for evidence of the Big Bang. Still, they do give weight to a steady flow. Without them, Thornton’s video might be hard to tell from its lobby predecessor by Refik Anadol. With them, it takes on at least a modicum of structure and mystery.
Still, for all their differences, they are crowd pleasers precisely because they will not change your day. Anadol billed his rising, swirling colors as an AI-generated tour of the museum, while Thornton calls her new media HANDMADE. (The scientist’s chalk board does have a space for “code.”) Apparently art does not need AI for the visual equivalent of elevator music. Maybe AI should try instead next time for the real thing.
Then again, maybe elevator music, too, is better the old-fashioned way, by hand. Upstairs, Alexandre Estrela salvages plates from a defunct printing press in Portugal for his Flat Bells. As the title suggests, he has found a way to flatten “Tubular Bells.” He extends the resonance so that striking the plates rings out like chimes. In between the chimes comes a dull, throbbing musical hum. He supplies seating, too, up in the fourth-floor studio so that you can relax and enjoy it, through January 7.
The plates also serve as inspiration for a projection as soothing as the audio. They once served for advertising, which Estrela abstracts away—in color on four monitors, fading in and out of black on larger screens, and in blood red on the entire far wall. He sees their patterns as prototypes for twentieth-century design. Does it seem strange that a printing press has become an object of nostalgia? Maybe this is indeed a digital age, but with retro devices and analog memories. Or maybe the shock of the new was the background music to modern life all along.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.