The star show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York right now is a
solo exhibition by explosion-happy Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The
show’s big centerpiece, snaking all the way up inside the Frank Lloyd
Wright spiral, is Seattle Art Museum’s Inopportune: Stage
One.
It looks great in there, and on all the
posters
and ads for the show.
But wait—the same piece is up at SAM right now. How’s that
possible? Is the piece editioned?
Last week I ran across this little credit caption under an image of
the installation on the Guggenheim’s website: “Seattle Art Museum, Gift
of Robert M. Arnold, in Honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle
Art Museum, 2006. Exhibition copy installed at Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008.”
Now hang on.
I’m imagining that the defense for making an “exhibition copy” is
that the work is conceptual. Essentially: The art is an idea
that can be executed over and over again, rather than an idea that
rests in specific materials—in this case, the white Mercurys and
Ford Tauruses and rods of exploding light—themselves. The
museum’s text describing the piece says as much: “The concept of
Inopportune: Stage One has been reconfigured…” (emphasis
mine).
But if that’s the case, if there is no physical original, then why
is this one called a “copy”? And why not make exhibition copies for
every work in the show, rather than going to the trouble of gathering
together originals? (The recently closed New York nonprofit gallery
Triple Candie presented the truly radical, post-art take on this
idea with its parade of unauthorized retrospectives made entirely
of reproductions.)
More likely than artistic motivations are career-based,
logistical, and publicity justifications. The artist and the museum
probably wanted the spectacular piece (first created at Mass MOCA) to
get a New York audience. That’s fine, but let’s not confuse it with
theoretical reasoning. Sol LeWitt, to my great dismay, is dead, and
the practice of artists, galleries, and institutions using
conceptualism as an all-purpose cover needs to die, too. 
