Muschamp reviews – badly – the Diller+Scofido exhibition

This post appeared in a previous blog and is here for posterity’s sake.

Our favorite architectural critic, Herbert Muschamp praises his friends Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio at the Diller + Scofidio retrospective at the Whitney. Sometimes I do not know where the crap Muschamp is coming from. Case in point in the very first paragraph:

But intelligent visitors will have to pick their way through a few unwelcome booby traps: curatorial winks and nods designed to dumb things down for the chimerical unsophisticates to whom far too many museum shows today are needlessly pitched.

What does this mean? Does Muschamp state that only himself and a small cadre of learned scholars can appreciate architecture, and by extension, the art world and life itself? Why broadening a topic for others outside our small incestuous group a bad idea, and any attempt to include those outside result in a show, which “dumb things down for the chimerical unsophisticates?” What elitist drivel. Muschamp should know better that subjects, and in this case art shows, can be read in multiple layers and texts? Architects are already seen as an elite group that is out of touch with the “common man.” Why add fuel to the fire? Diller + Scofidio have produced some very intriguing and challenging work in the last few years, work that acts to broaden architecture and bring back the tenuous connection with art and the ephemeral and temporal. I wish you would restrict your critique to the show’s content, and be less concerned with signage, the “didactic wall texts” which obviously you fine disdainful and are just now recovering from temporary blindness, and the fact the there might be common plebes in the audience trying to appreciate a profession that is so rich and rewarding that we participate in.
Please check your elitism at the door Mr. Muschamp, and let the common man into the room – if they can get around your ego.

4 thoughts on “Muschamp reviews – badly – the Diller+Scofido exhibition

  1. i.e. why people are not interested in hiring architects. interesting that when a doctor or lawyer uses confusing language it is because they have more knowledge, yet when an architect uses confusing language it is because he is out of touch with the common man.

  2. Very true, but how many times do you have a doctor write a review on a medical procedure in a nationally read paper, whose audience is a wide range from the “common man” to executives to the intelligentsia. There is a time and place for elevated discourse, with special heed to the audience, the discourse can and should be raised. The biggest problem I have with Muschamp is the fact that he assumes that only a very small segment of the population is reading his review, or that only a small part of the population could understand his prose and the art exhibition. As part of the architecture community, we are fundamentally communicators – of ideas, of dreams, of issues – both inside our profession and externally to the public at large and our clients. It is our job to educate – not to bemoan the perceived “dumbing down” of the art world.

  3. fa sho, mikey… i’m with you both on this one…. screw the elitist “better than you” sentiment that allows us to be somewhat respected for our knowledge but more importantly deemed unnecessary and too costly by the common man, and that is exactly what talk like muschamp’s is doing…

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