Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle, Guggenheim Museum


An expensive Hollywood auction where props and costumes from Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars: Episode One are sold for the price of some countries’ GDP.

Sporty things that are spilling out.

The subject of this art is the individual acquisition of cultural capital, fame and money, symbolized by Barney climbing the wall of the Guggenheim to displace Richard Serra form the lofty heights.

Tomb Raider.

Expensive racing side-car motorcycles with testicles.

Barney’s art is similar to that of the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix Reloaded: a confusing and tedious self-enclosed fantasy world whose primary purpose is to display wealth and status to earn more of same.

Not nearly enough stuff to fill the space.

Intensely inventive, but using the inventiveness in an all-out embrace of corporate art power, hence of trans-national corporate power?

Late 90’s internet bubble capital feeling.

Is it just an elaborate teaser for the movies? Hence the overwhelming feeling of incompleteness?

Hermetically sealed preoccupations siphoned into a franchisable fantasy world.

Creatively blocking social reality as a part of trading up the social ladder.