The New Museum is a strange and varied entity. It lurks atop many year-end best-of lists (current raves include Lynda Benglis’s first major retrospective and the fabulous Ostalgia), but is also host to some of the most critically maligned exhibitions around. These bombastic, boy shows receive mostly disastrous reviews but spin a buzz around the institution as an espace terrible. Such shows mine artworld heavyweights that only collectors love to love (Maurizio Cattelan, Takashi Murakami, Chris Ofili) and give the general public an opportunity to stretch out and enjoy contemporary art with wow factors that throw caution to the wind of an otherwise composed New York art world. I was given one particularly enlightening view of such a show, Skin Fruit, when poet and San Francisco art maven Dodie Bellamy was visiting the city with her partner, poet, novelist and Amazon.com top 100 reviewer, Kevin Killian. Dodie and I walked through the museum’s galleries with her characteristic dispirited wonder. Turning the corner she would arch an eyebrow and, instead of emitting the disgust that was nearly universal, would chortle, “well, this is a hoot.” While exceptionally smart and profoundly well-read, in these New environs this duo approached the contemporary art space with a grain of salt, as the fun house it so often is. Here, they were smart to remind, the uncanny still has value and theater can certainly still affect. I mean, this is the institution that branded its new building with a lighted rainbow sign reading “Hell, Yes!”

So, just in time for the holidays, the New Museum has rolled out the red carpet for Belgian scientist-cum-artist, Carsten Höller, with his first New York retrospective, entitled Experience. The show employs many of this spectacle-wrangler’s signature endeavors––a whirling metal lighted carousel, a sensory deprivation tank (Giant Psycho Tank), Upside-down goggles, giant mushrooms, and yes, the much-hyped metal slide which slices through three of the building’s floors, spitting museum-goers through the architecture at breakneck speed. Visitors sign waivers to cut any personal injury claims off at the pass. And woe to those who do not participate in these playland bells and whistles––because that’s precisely what this show is all about. Experience is a perfect platform for the New Museum’s showmanship impulse, an exhibition where compositional aesthetics are almost completely slighted for their calculated effect.

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Carsten Höller 
Rhinoceros, 2011
Photo: Bradford Nordeen}