The Talent Show

MoMA P.S. 1, New York

Through April 4

Sometimes art foretells the future, said Ken Johnson in The New York Times. Projected on one wall in this ensemble show at the Museum of Modern Art’s Queens, N.Y., satellite are Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests—16-mm film portraits, created in the mid-1960s, of “famous, semi-famous, and unknown subjects.” Suddenly, there appears a beautiful young woman named Robin. Though she’s not one of the series’ celebrities, “there seems no reason to think she could not have been another superstar had she been more self-assertive.” Beginning almost a half-century ago, Warhol and a handful of other artists seemed to divine the advent of a culture of exhibitionism now “epitomized by YouTube, American Idol, and Jersey Shore.” Some did so by calling attention to themselves and away from the things they were making. Others, like David Lamelas, invited viewers “to exhibit themselves,” and thus become living works of art.

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The Talent Show is most affecting when it’s exploring “the tensions between exhibitionism and voyeurism,” said Ariella Budick in the Financial Times. Photographer Shizuka Yokomizo “never met the subjects” who agreed to appear in her 1990s Stranger series. She instead won their cooperation by leaving handwritten notes inviting them to stand in front of their windows while she photographed them at night from across the street. Several years earlier, French artist Sophie Calle became another “pioneer in the art of privacy invasion” when, upon finding an address book on the street, she began calling the people it listed and then used the dirt they provided to write a portrait of the book’s owner, serializing the story in a French newspaper. Not surprisingly, Calle’s subject threatened to sue. But if there’s a flaw in this otherwise challenging exhibition, it’s that all such “pre-Internet intrusiveness” today seems almost quaint.