Sculpture The room-size "Float Boat" (2010), made of 150 incandescent orbs in a rowboat, is a centerpiece of the year-old Chihuly Collection, the only permanent installation of work by the glass wizard Dale Chihuly.
Germano Celant's installation of work from the collection of Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, in the nearby Ca' Corner della Regina, is a brilliant mixing of old spaces and relatively new art ranging from Donald Judd and Lucio Fontana to Jeff Koons and Francesco Vezzoli.
The center opened in 1989, but its programming has become increasingly ambitious in recent years, so its popularity has grown: in July, a show called "Elles: Women Artists in the Pompidou Center Collection" was just wrapping up, and on previous visits I'd seen a large multimedia installation of work by Laurie Anderson, an M. C. Escher show and a selection of French Impressionist paintings.
| "A Memorial Installation of Works by Robert Rauschenberg".
More complicated, but also tendentious, is an installation of works related to eating and slavery.
What lifts this higgledy-piggledy selection above your usual show-and-tell exhibition is the installation of works according to themes, thanks to the exhibition's curator, Dede Young.
You might view the jampacked, multifloor installation of works by close to 400 artists as a populist, radically inclusive survey of what artists in New York are really creating outside the filtering systems of galleries, museums and curators.
And among the shows with openings this week are a survey of Louisa Matthiasdottir's paintings at Salander-O'Reilly (now on view) and a new installation of works by Fred Sandback (opening tomorrow) that will inaugurate the Lawrence Markey Gallery, newly arrived from SoHo.
With 2010, the whole museum has been given over to celebrating the 75th anniversary of the show: alongside Collecting Biennials, an installation of works from the permanent collection by artists who have previously appeared, all the way from Edward Hopper, Warhol and Rothko to Kenneth Anger, Eva Hesse and Julian Schnabel.
Tuesday also brings the opening of a dense, salon-style installation of works by some 40 artists at De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space.
