FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021 C1

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NEWS CRITICISM

4 FILM REVIEW

A supersizemarathon for theJustice League. BY MAYA PHILLIPS

10 ART REVIEW

MoMA andCalder in shapelysymbiosis.BY ROBERTA SMITH

14 TELEVISION REVIEW

Cynthia Erivotries on ArethaFranklin’s shoes.BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK

FEELING A LITTLE LIKE Alice in Wonderlandas gigantic digital images of red, white andcream-colored dahlias budded, bloomedand shattered on the wall in front of me, Idithered over what I was witnessing. Is thisa forward step in the march of modernismor a debasement of art into theme-park en-tertainment?

The dazzling floral extravaganza byteamLab, a digital art collective based in To-

Superblue is the blue-chip contestant in therapidly growing field of immersive art.

The popularity of this genre is driven bycontradictory desires, as demonstratedmemorably by the line of visitors in 2019who waited up to six hours for a one-minutestay amid the twinkling lights in YayoiKusama’s infinity mirror room at the DavidZwirner gallery in Chelsea. Malnourishedby their phones and computer screens, peo-ple yearn for real-life visceral experiences.

And yet they remain stuck in the gravita-tional pull of virtual reality: The experi-ences they seek are ones they can record ontheir phone cameras and post on social me-dia.

The renovated warehouse that Superblueoccupies in Miami is across the street froma more traditional contemporary art institu-tion, the Rubell Museum, which reopened atthe end of 2019 in Allapattah, a commercial

TeamLab’s “Proliferating Immense Life, a Whole Year Per Year,” an interactive digital installation at Superblue in Miami, which begins previews next week. Flowers bud, grow huge and die off, accelerated by a viewer’s touch.

ALFONSO DURAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

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After a year of sensory deprivation, a critic dips a toe into the new,high-powered immersive art center in Miami.

Getting Up to Your Eyeballs in Art

ARTHUR LUBOW CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

Superblue MiamiOpens on April 22

kyo, is the dynamic centerpiece of an inau-gural exhibition at Superblue, a Miami “ex-periential art center” (or EAC to initiates)that begins invitational previews next weekbefore opening to the public on April 22.Backed by the juggernaut Pace Gallery andLaurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective,

I WAS A FREELANCE CRITIC, but not on duty,when I attended a Saturday matinee per-formance of Wagner’s sprawling comedy“Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” at theMetropolitan Opera in December 1995.

The cast was close to ideal. The elegantBernd Weikl as the wise cobbler Hans

ent, and played with alertness and ease, inthat long-ago “Meistersinger,” it was inlarge part because of Levine’s leadership,then already of over 20 years’ standing. I es-pecially remember Hans Sachs’s soliloquy,when this generally tolerant character sud-denly, angrily bewails the selfishness hewitnesses in his neighbors. Levine tappedinto the mellow harmonic richness andwistful poignancy of the music, almost as ifoffering Sachs consolation, as if urging himnot to lose his faith in people.

Now, of course, it is impossible to ignorethat it was Levine who was selfish, someonewho could make you lose your faith in peo-

James Levine leading theMetropolitan OperaOrchestra in 1991. Hedied on March 9.

STEVE J. SHERMAN

James Levine built a greatorchestra at the MetropolitanOpera but left a trail of scandal.

ANTHONY TOMMASINI AN APPRAISAL

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A Shining LegacyClouded by Shame

Sachs. A luminous Karita Mattila as youngEva. The heroic Ben Heppner as Walther,who falls for her. And Hermann Prey, a dis-tinguished veteran, as Beckmesser, thetown busybody.

Yet the star was James Levine.It was often like that when he was con-

ducting during his decades-long reign at theMet, which ended in ignominy a few yearsago amid disturbing allegations of sexualabuse and harassment — and then conclu-sively with his death, on March 9, at 77.

If the Met Orchestra sounded resplend-

“DAVID FINCHER’S MASTERWORK.”THE TELEGRAPH

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and working-class area west of its formerlocation in the now-gentrified Wynwooddistrict. Mera Rubell told Marc Glimcher,the chief executive of Pace, of the availabil-ity of the building when they happened tobe seated next to each other at a large din-ner. The structure contains 31,000 squarefeet of exhibition space, with 30-foot ceil-ings. It will display installations for a yearor a year and a half before they are truckedoff to other Superblue sites in yet-to-be-an-nounced cities. “That’s something we haveto do to make the economics work,” MollieDent-Brocklehurst, the London-based co-founder, told me on a Zoom call.

For the inaugural exhibition, Superblueincluded “AKHU” by James Turrell, theSouthern Californian who is an éminencegrise of the experiential art world. The in-stallation is what Turrell calls a “ganzfeld,”a German word that denotes the loss ofspatial perception that occurs in a feature-less uniform visual field, such as a fogwhiteout. (As with schadenfreude,Ganzfeld has no English counterpart.) In“AKHU” (an ancient Egyptian term thatroughly translates as “soul”) an oblong oflight is projected onto a smooth blank walland tints the room. The color of the lightgradually changes. If you climb the black-carpeted steps toward the threshold of theilluminated wall, your sense of where youare teeters vertiginously.

Turrell’s ganzfelds are not new to me, but“AKHU” provided a useful yardstick to as-sess the two other art installations in theshow. A ganzfeld creates a contemplativemood in which time slows and space dema-terializes. At the same time, it exposes thestructures of visual perception (and mis-

perception) that make the magic.But why was I resistant to the notion that

a simple spectacle might also be art? Art-ists have never eschewed showmanship.Bernini was a theater artist as well as asculptor. In one of his plays (a 17th-centurypredecessor of “Miss Saigon” and “Phan-tom of the Opera”), a torrent of waterrushed toward the gasping audience, di-verted by sluices at the last moment. Ofcourse, no one remembers Bernini for hisdivertissements. We salute “Apollo andDaphne,” marveling at how a sculptor, us-ing the intractable substance of marble,could depict the fluid transformation of anymph into a tree. Art certainly can be en-tertaining, but it must also be enlighteningor disorienting. When it only titillates, itloses its claim to be art.

The crowd-pleasing touring shows of im-mersive projections of van Gogh paintings,which have proliferated as vigorously assunflowers over the last decade, are to artwhat military music is to music. Anotherenterprise, Meow Wolf (why do experien-tial art organizations have such terriblenames?), promotes the artistic credentialsof its immersive installations more credi-bly. Formed in Santa Fe, N.M., in 2008,Meow Wolf recently opened Omega Martin Las Vegas and plans to inaugurate aspace in Denver this year. Omega Mart re-sembles a supermarket with weird setsand bizarre commodities, all of themcrafted by participating artists.

Underlying Omega Mart is a narrativehaving to do with a sinister corporation, amystery waiting for the visitor to pry out.When I asked its co-chief executive Ali Ru-binstein how Meow Wolf differed from Dis-ney — a question she was well qualified toanswer, because she had worked at Disneyfor over two decades — she emphasizedthat “Disney’s experiences are pro-grammed and there is an expectationabout how a guest will move through a landor an attraction,” while “Meow Wolf is allabout giving our visitors the opportunity todesign their own experience and choosehow deeply they want to dive into the nar-rative component.”

Tellingly, the fantasy novelist GeorgeR. R. Martin, whose books were adaptedinto the HBO series “Game of Thrones,” isa major investor in Meow Wolf. OmegaMart transposes the Pop Art critique ofAmerican consumer culture that was ex-pressed in Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store”— a witty panorama of commercial prod-ucts, staged in 1961 — to the realm ofMinecraft.

Is it art or something else? A better ques-tion might be, is it good? Marcel Du-champ’s ready-mades, Tristan Tzara’sDada performances, Robert Smithson’sland art, Tino Sehgal’s constructed situa-tions — in innumerable ways, modernistartists have crossed and dissolved bound-aries.

Immersive art aims to take that missionfurther.

Es Devlin, whose “Forest of Us” is part ofSuperblue’s first exhibition, has worked asa theatrical designer for 25 years, creatingcelebrated sets for “The Lehman Trilogy,”Kanye West tours and “About Time: Fash-ion and Duration,” the Metropolitan Muse-um’s Costume Institute show last fall. At-tending art school in London, Devlin ad-mired the Young British Artists who pre-ceded her, but, she told me in Miami: “Icouldn’t get my head around making andselling an object. My natural world was thetheater.” In the last five years, she has pro-gressed from creating designs for otherartists to acquiring “the confidence towrite a narrative.”

“Forest of Us” begins with a film of al-most three minutes, in which Devlin de-picts branching — bronchi in the lungs,limbs of trees, rivulets into streams. Thevoice-over starts, “Every time I reach afork in the road, I choose both paths,” andends, “Can you find it? Go and find it!” Atwhich point the screen parts, and the vis-itor walks through a portal into a maze.With stretched Mylar film on the ceiling,optical-glass mirror on the surroundingwalls, and winding paths bordered by pol-ished aluminum dividers, “Forest of Us” isa kind of hedge maze in which the tradi-tional boxwood has been replaced by re-flective surfaces.

Staring at my bounced-back image, Iwas reminded of Kusama’s visionary “Nar-cissus Garden,” an expanse of mirror ballslying on the ground. (First created in 1966at the Venice Biennale, “Narcissus Gar-den” happens to be on view in a later for-mat at the Rubell Museum.) But Devlin’swork envelops you. Eventually you cometo a shallow pool, 6 feet wide and 35 feetlong, where, standing on marked circles atthe edge, you can raise your arms and seeyour reflection as a dendritic filigree andhear the whooshing intake of breath.Chilled, I felt I was standing by the bank ofthe river Styx, experiencing not my per-

Getting Up To Your Eyeballs In Big Artworks

In an exhibition, yoursense of where you areteeters vertiginously.

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C8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021

ARTHUR LUBOW

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALFONSO DURAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Superblue MiamiOpens on April 22 in Miami; 786-697-3405.Tickets go on sale in early April; to be alertedwhen they go live, sign up at superblue.com/miami.

Clockwise from far left, top, teamLab’s cloud room atSuperblue; the theatrical designer Es Devlin’s immersiveenvironment “Forest of Us”; soap bubbles at the cloud room;an image at James Turrell’s “AKHU”; Toshiyuki Inoko, aco-founder of teamLab; and Devlin in “Forest of Us.”

N C9THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MARCH 19, 2021

CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK

my hand touched the flowers on the wall, Iaccelerated their dying — a caustic com-ment on humankind’s blight, as well as aravishing rendition of the Japanese aes-thetic of the ephemerality of beauty.

In 2018, Inoko persuaded Glimcher tobreak a taboo and charge $20 for admissionto a teamLab exhibition at Pace’s Palo Altogallery. Pace represents several other art-ists whose experiential installations don’tlend themselves to conventional gallerysales: Leo Villareal, Random Interna-tional, DRIFT. Pace was marketing theirpieces to developers and governments.“They would be placed in shopping mallsor on bridges,” Dent-Brocklehurst said.

The Superblue alternative model (whichis not restricted to Pace artists) funds pro-duction of the work and pays royalties tothe artists on ticket sales. A ticket to Su-perblue Miami costs $36, with a $10 add-onto see an additional teamLab project,“Massless Clouds Between Sculpture andLife,” an audience-tickling creation inwhich clouds of soap bubbles form, hoverand dissipate as visitors walk throughthem.

Inoko told me that the cloud is like a vi-rus, “at the boundary between what is liv-ing and isn’t living, and organic and inor-ganic.” Because of the coronavirus, Su-perblue Miami will initially operate at 50percent capacity. It is better equipped thana conventional museum to meet that re-striction. Shantelle Rodriguez, director ofexperiential art centers for Superblue,said, “These artists have a very specificidea of the number of people who should bein a room to have the experience.”

For me, the immersive experience be-gan, not entirely pleasantly, with my tripfrom New York to Miami, the first time Ihad been on an airplane in over a year. Itcontinued with the alarmingly insouciantatmosphere in South Beach, where I re-turned to my hotel one evening to find aparty of unmasked college studentspacked as tight as bedded asparagus bythe swimming pool. In my discombobu-lated mood, the trippy, meditative, gor-geous installations of Superblue washedover me as a respite and solace. My resist-ance melted. My doubts subsided. Like thekids in my hotel, after a year of privation Iwas ready to be seduced.

sonal demise but the death of the planet.At Superblue, the barrier between the

viewer and the artwork has evaporated,which is the long-stated mission of team-Lab. One way to regard the group’s show-stopping displays in Miami is that they al-low a visitor to pass through a computerscreen, just as the characters in JeanCocteau’s film “Orphee” walk through mir-rors. “What makes a boundary is the recog-nition of one by people,” said ToshiyukiInoko, a co-founder of teamLab, speakingthrough an interpreter as he tweaked theMiami installations shortly before theopening. “On a computer screen, once peo-ple recognize the screen it becomes aboundary. We are trying to eliminate orsoften the boundary.”

Indeed, the largest of teamLab’s four ex-hibitions at Superblue Miami is devoted totwo separately conceived works that havebeen interwoven. “Universe of Water Par-ticles, Transcending Boundaries” is a dig-ital waterfall that cascades down two wallsand onto the shiny floor; coming into con-tact with a visitor’s feet, the stream parts.Concurrently, another work, “Flowers andPeople, Cannot be Controlled but Live To-gether,” is erupting with huge blossomsthat grow and die. The flowers bloom onthe ground only in those spaces that havebeen cleared of the watery image by thevisitor’s presence.

The teamLab collaborative embraces itsJapanese heritage most directly in a sin-gle-channel video, “Life Survives by thePower of Life II,” which transmogrifies theKanji symbol for “life” into a tree branchpassing through seasonal change in adance of 3-D calligraphy. In another room,“Proliferating Immense Life, a Whole YearPer Year” displays a sequence of renderedflowers that grow huge and fly off as petals,leaving behind a grid of small gold-brownwall squares — an allusion to the gold leafapplied to the paper surface of a Japanesescreen as well as (to my mind at least) barewinter fields shadowed by clouds. When

JAMES TURRELL; ANDREA MORA