Exhibit of the week: The Bruce High Quality Foundation: Ode to Joy, 2001–2013

Brooklyn Museum

Through Sept. 22

“Think of them as the Bruce Waynes of the art world,” said Christian Viveros-Fauné in The Village Voice. The members of the Bruce High Quality Foundation, a Brooklyn-based art collective, clearly prefer Batman-style anonymity to personal celebrity, so the members have hidden behind masks or otherwise remained faceless since the group’s 2004 founding. The “Bruces” work in various media, but mischievous performance pieces have been a calling card: In 2004, members took to the East River to re-enact Théodore Géricault’s 1819 oil painting Raft of the Medusa. In 2011, the collective painted a limo school-bus yellow and took it on an 11-city tour to protest high art-school tuitions. The uselessness of the acts even serves a purpose: The group appears dedicated to unshackling art from market forces by creating things that can’t be bought or sold.

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“The joke of the Bruces is that they are in fact insiders,” said Hrag Vartanian in Hyperallergic.com. They’re represented by the son of painter/filmmaker Julian Schnabel, they sell to billionaires, and their Brooklyn Museum show is just the latest example of an art institution investing in their grand endeavor. And “as anyone in the age of the Internet knows,” any party who hurls criticisms from behind the mask of anonymity is hardly playing fair. Yet the tactic is not without precedent in the art world, as people who remember the Guerrilla Girls might attest, said John Perreault in ArtsJournal.com. The anonymity usefully unsettles insiders and, as this “tightly curated and well-installed compendium” of the Bruces’ numerous projects shows, this group does a good job of deflating the cult of art. “Where else can you see Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon reworked to show five men rather than five women in various stages of cubistic disarray?” Or a “hilarious and poignant” reconstruction, in Play-Doh, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Greek and Egyptian antiquities?

Actually, the group’s “jaundiced view of mainstream culture” entered the mainstream decades ago, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. The Picasso riff “might have meant something” back in the 1970s at the height of second-wave feminism; “now it’s a clichéd idea.” Silk-screen reproductions of the most famous photograph from the Battle of Iwo Jima “also beat a conceptual dead horse.” The Bruces do produce affecting videos; for whatever reason, that medium inspires the group to offer viewers more than tired critiques of the art world. If the Bruces are as young as most of us assume they are, it’s easier to “look with sympathy past their too-often stale irreverence” and give them credit for their prolificacy. But they do need to step up their game.