電影《凱特布蘭琪：宣言13》影評：Do the acting excessively, but don't act

When there is a shortage of genuine urgency -- political or aesthetic or otherwise, an established artist makes art by finding an established actress to read out loud established art historical texts, and calls it manifesto.

It doesn't seem to be self conscious of the irony of its commercial gloss, bourgeois opulence, stylish artifice. Is there a manifesto that does not manifests anything new, raw, or real? Is there such a thing as a makeup manifesto?

Maybe there is, in the kind of art world establishment we have. Maybe there isn't, there are only make-up artists -- there is apparently an army of them here, who are the true artists of this artwork.

I used to think it is bad enough for us today to have only dead manifestos. When Julian Rosefeldt bring them back to life, I see zombies. Now I regret.

The ticket money I spent on this How Art Museum exhibition: what a regret also. How Art Museum, like many of those newly established contemporary art institutions in the past few years in this country, thinks that having a "creative" name makes it look more creative. It does, but this "creativity" has as little to do with contemporary art creation as Julian Rosefeldt's "Manifesto" has anything to do with manifesto.

This is the first exhibition (a manifesto exhibition) of How Art Museum, along with a design exhibition elegantly titled "The New Creative Future of Chinese Design," and a shop almost the size of a whole exhibition floor filled with arty merchandise, appropriately named "art derivatives", by Jeff Koons, Murakami Takashi, Xu Zhen, Xiang Jing & Qu Guangci, and their wannabes. Outside the shop is the namesake hotel filled with sculptures and paintings by even worse artists. The museum requires all visitors to exit the museum into hotel's third floor (then to its tasteless lobby), instead of the museum entrance, so that we have to endure this exhibition outside the exhibition.

Unlike Julian Rosefeldt, who does have his own merits in art, which I do not bother to mention here, this bright new How museum seems to be desperately assembling and manifesting everything that is wrong with the art world, and from its beginning we've learned that all it wants to do in the future is to assemble and manifest more. The only problem left for them is how.