Solid Gold Proves All That Glitters Isn’t Necessarily Good, or Coherent

Brooklyn Museum’s 500-object show is a gilded albatross.

E ven when its exhibitions are obese and incoherent, I always enjoy visiting the Brooklyn Museum. On the one hand, it’s among our most distinguished museums — it’s celebrating its 200th birthday. On the other, it’s a buzzy, bold alternative art space. But “bold” can become “dreadful,” and Solid Gold, one of its current shows, took lots of effort to be just that.

Juxtaposing film against fashion, design, Old Master painting, and lots of gold baubles, it tells us a story of gold’s odyssey across cultures and over centuries. At 500 objects, it’s immense, a long, circuitous street paved with gold, glitter, and lots of alchemy. And here’s a first — I saw Solid Gold two weeks ago, and it’s still giving me bad dreams.

The exhibit starts with the 1963 movie Cleopatra, specifically the scene showing the arrival of the Egyptian queen — played by Elizabeth Taylor — in Rome. It’s a bizarre, elephantine spectacle. All we needed was a parting sea and a Busby Berkeley number. “We’re not in Brooklyn anymore,” I thought, meaning we’ve left the realm of the lucid for one of phantoms. I’d been warned. Next to the introductory panel is a video of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018 to explore the outer reaches of the Sun’s atmosphere.

The six-minute clip from Cleopatra is on a big video screen high on the wall. In cases on the floor are synthetic gold Adidas sneakers, selections from the Blonds’ “Egyptian Disco” collection from 2016, gold-lamé dresses from Dior, and a gold, platinum, and diamond wristwatch designed by Jacob Arabo in 1994. The Blonds, I learned, are a fashion-designer couple specializing in outré, luxury glamour via rhinestones and a gold palette. There are dozens of their garments in the exhibition. Three or four would have conveyed their style.

There’s a shred here and there of method to the madness. Liz’s Cleopatra wears a gold gown that pushed the world sequin industry to the max given her prodigious bosom. Ancient writers, or some of them, thought gold was the magic product of sunlight and river water. And Egypt is pretty old. Like disco, it’s got endless revivals under its gold chain-link belt.

There’s so much fake gold in the show that I salivated when I saw the Brooklyn hoard — gold bling from Turkish tombs of the late Roman era, and Nasca gold and Quimbaya gold, all South American, dates unknown but old, old, old. Next to these is a diamond, gold, and hand-painted enamel dental grill designed for the jeweler Gabby Elan in 2021 for the American rapper class. We take the new with the old. That grill couldn’t be comfortable, and no tootsie rolls allowed.

I’m up for most things, and my mind was still open a crack, but there are three problems here. First, I like the real thing, and that’s the ancient gold. If the aim of Solid Gold is to overwhelm, best to start there, not with a solar probe, the Blonds, and Cleopatra, the grandest of clunkers but still a clunker. The Met has enough Greek and Roman gold jewelry to choke Pegasus and his prodigy. I would have borrowed the best to augment Brooklyn’s collection, starting Solid Gold with metallurgical satin and silk, not chintz. Second, as it is, the ancient gold, mostly little things, is overwhelmed by fashion, which, after a short bit, becomes so many mannequins wearing so much flimsy gold frippery. Brooklyn, we know, has a superb fashion collection. The curators, in extreme unedited mode, wanted to show it all, but less of, say, the Blonds, is more. Third, I like chronology. Solid Gold bounces among the centuries, dizzying the visitor, which, I think, is the goal. A spinning head tends not to notice when logic’s gone missing.

There’s El Dorado, the history of gold bars, South African mining and apartheid, a bit on the Gold Rush, Korean gold-and-ink painting, the history of gold leaf, and an enmeshed Tina Turner, shakin’ her chains away — all covered in a gallery and a half. A space on gold coinage could have been an exhibition in itself. I didn’t expect to see John Singer Sargent’s Egyptian Woman (Coin Necklace), from 1891. It depicts a woman wearing a necklace made from dangling gold coins. Barbara Walters owned the painting for 40 years. It was a nice surprise and a bit of a lifesaver. Sargent’s a familiar presence in a state of gold overload.

I’m baffled by a gallery, lovely indeed at first, displaying some of the Brooklyn Museum’s sublime “gold-ground” early Italian religious scenes. Gold ground — gold leaf applied as a background for painting or mosaics — is radiant by candlelight and infused these scenes of saints with spiritual transcendence. Why are these precious things juxtaposed against Titus Kaphar’s Jerome Project, from 2014? These are big pictures based on mug shots of men in prison, on a gold ground, their faces mostly obliterated by a tar-based, black paint. “The thick layers of tar encroach upon the subject, representing the harm and long-term effects of living in the carceral state.” Huh? What does that have to do with the Italian art? What does the carceral state have to do with gold? The answer is “nothing, nada, nichts.” It’s so much gilded bovine doo-doo. These guys aren’t saints.

There are sections on gold and color combinations, gold and patterns, gold and Buddha, and gold awards. El Anatsui’s Black Block, from 2010, a wall hanging made from black whiskey-bottle caps, with brand names printed in red and gold, is, at 10 by 17 feet, a statement piece, but the statement, at this point, is “There’s gold in that there art.” But does that cut the Gulden’s mustard? There are gold sarongs, capes, collars, and tunics from China, Turkey, Sumatra, Japan, and Uttar Pradesh. There are tables, frames, clocks, and glass. There’s an Art Deco mural from the S.S. Normandie. There’s a gold leaf and oil painting by Agnes Martin, unusual in that she did only three gold grids but, ultimately, tacky, as is a gold sculpture by Louise Nevelson. Then there’s fashion from Christian Louboutin, Gianfranco Ferré, Cartier, Dior, Balenciaga, Chester Weinberg, Halston, Thierry Mugler, and on and on. At 500 objects, gold or no gold, it’s a numbing experience.

My bad dreams? A Marc Quinn sculpture from 2008 quotes the scene from Goldfinger, the 1964 James Bond movie in which a Bond girl died from suffocation, sprayed by gold-infused paint. Her death stemmed from Goldfinger’s attempt to irradiate the gold in Fort Knox, to make it useless and increase the value of his own gold stash. Trying to escape Solid Gold, all doors leading to more gold disco garb, I was nearly sprayed to death by mannequins wearing Robert Wun’s golden phoenix gown, though possibly his scorched-bride gown from his “Fear” collection. Another flight dream involved Giorgio di Sant’Angelo’s disembodied gold-toned metal mesh pants chasing me through Brooklyn.

There’s songwriter Paul Jabara’s Oscar for Last Dance and some of his gold records. At the end of the exhibition, Solid Gold does discover what it is, which is a disco fashion show. It doesn’t exactly end with a fizzle. Two sections, Crowned: Egyptian Queens to Hip Hop Kings and Disco Era Gold, both in a single, big gallery, seem to blend to “illuminate gold’s enduring role in commemorating success, fame, and status.” On the one hand, it’s an innocuous theme. The curators were exhausted, as was I. On the other, at least it’s compact and coherent.

The curators might have been under some pressure to haul from the vaults as much of the permanent collection as they could fit into the galleries, regardless of redundancy or scrutability. Obviously, they can’t edit themselves. There’s no justification for a 500-object show. There’s no catalogue, which is a shame in that most of the things on view would have sufficed as illustrations. The idea behind Solid Gold — gold’s primordial, indescribable fascination to us — isn’t bad, but the discipline was lacking.

I can’t and won’t call the Brooklyn Museum snake-bit, but its troubles are legion, though, unlike Rome’s vast legions, it marches, sometimes trudges, forward if not always upward. It’s had money troubles nearly its whole life, and it’s more often, and more famously, broke than not. Brooklyn’s donor base isn’t Manhattan’s, and the museum has gone through competitive spasms with Manhattan’s high culture hot spots such as the Met and MoMA, but that’s always a losing battle. Art critics, art reporters, big donors, and tourists think Brooklyn is adventure travel.

The museum’s strategy from the ’90s through to, more or less, today has been building audiences, donor interest, visibility, and chicness via temporary shows that are both blockbusters and, for an art museum, offbeat. I reviewed a recent Brooklyn Museum exhibition, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64, and while I loved the Beatles, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was meant to pull crowds, not enlighten minds. Christian Dior, David Bowie, Star Wars, Spike Lee, and Frida Kahlo got a Brooklyn spotlight, too, all mixed-bag shows, most unwieldy and aimless, as is Solid Gold.

This isn’t an exhibition philosophy pioneered by Anne Pasternak, the director, whom I like. She’s led the museum for ten years, coming from Creative Time, a Brooklyn art space focusing on public-art projects. Brooklyn’s philosophy comes from her predecessor, Arnold Lehman, whom I also like and who directed the museum for 17 years. Sensation, the museum’s combustible 1999 exhibition of the Saatchi collection of new British art, drew it into a tussle with Mayor Giuliani. It was a bit of a shock-jock show, aiming at headlines rather than substance.

I reviewed It’s Pablomatic, a Brooklyn Museum exhibition in 2023 on Picasso, curated, in part, by the Australian lesbian comedian Hannah Gadsby. I’d never heard of her but did my due diligence and watched two of her stand-up shows on Netflix. I’d rather have been chased by disembodied gold-mesh pants. Comedy today is about heartache and subjugation, so I wasn’t shocked to see that Gadsby’s about as funny as a toddler’s funeral. Still, the art — mostly by Picasso — was great and the arrangement first-rate. Picasso’s work was juxtaposed against art, mostly from the ’70s and ’80s, by women artists, and that art was great, too. The museum’s premise — Picasso was a cad — is as old and hoary as the last Kaiser’s pith helmet. Not even the feminist artists in the show bought it.

I’m sorry to read that the Brooklyn Museum, as it starts its anniversary year, is having a financial crisis. Pasternak announced on Friday that at least 10 percent of the staff, already much truncated over years, will get pink slips in face of a $10 million deficit. As much as Toward Joy is bogus, Solid Gold is bloated, and It’s Pablomatic is a bore, the museum is among New York’s treasures.

While pockets of Brooklyn prosper, it’s not Manhattan, yet the Brooklyn Museum’s physical plant is necessarily vast and expensive. If Brooklyn has billionaires, I wish they’d do some serious endowment-building for the museum. Manhattan’s got billionaires and millionaires by the boatload. I wish they’d see in the Brooklyn Museum a place that’s both worthy and needy. As with the Hispanic Society in Harlem, its chronic money troubles descend more from its location than its programs. Both own world-class collections. Both have had so many staff reductions over the years.

It might sound odd to advocate robust giving to Brooklyn after this story, but it’s 200 years old and a storied, art-rich museum. Like every organization, it goes through phases. It’s doing shows that the Whitney, the Met, the Guggenheim, and MoMA won’t do because they’re too outré. There’s a good case for this, though Solid Gold doesn’t bolster it.

Brooklyn is at a bare-bones level. Its endowment is a scant $175 million. With a $64 million budget, its fundraising burden is huge, and its deficit this year is said to be $10 million. The Met, by contrast, has $4 billion in the bank. In addition to layoffs, senior member of the staff are taking pay cuts. Brooklyn’s going to do fewer loan exhibitions, which is a good, long overdue idea. Solid Gold isn’t traveling. Museums tour their exhibitions for visibility but also for income. There’s a loan fee, or costs for shipping and insurance are shared. Who’d want it, though? One review of the 1963 movie Cleopatra reads, “Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic elan; generally it just bumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition.” At the Brooklyn Museum, the past just raised its ugly head and tossed its solid-gold curls.