The exhibition has a simple but interestingly complicated premise: works of art are living, breathing, decaying, broken things. All works of art, like all things, are ephemeral. Organized by Margot Norton, chief curator of the Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive, To glorify the ephemeral: The (im)permanent collection may be a restorer’s nightmare, but it is also an audience’s dream.
This is Norton’s first curatorial project since she joined the museum last year, and it’s based on an idea she came up with during a job interview. The exhibition, which draws from the museum’s collections, focuses on ephemeral, conceptual, and performance art—genres with a rich history in the Bay Area. Yet today we’re seeing less ephemeral and more that can be easily implemented.
Should art function like Dorian Gray and remain perfectly young over time? It is definitely easier to assign value to such a work and then let it monetize flawlessly on the art market.
Glorifying the ephemeral celebrates an alternative approach. The exhibition features examples of artists who rebelled against the idea of permanence, either because they refused to participate in the status quo of the art market or because their artistic concerns took them into new realms. The tension is that most of the works in this exhibition treat the idea of impermanence as a subject rather than a physical evidence of it. For example, a series of Andy Warhol Polaroids reference the fleeting nature of time as captured in a snapshot – but there is little in this medium that challenges traditional methods of photography.
The exhibition begins with the works that are most materially relevant to the theme of transience: objects that embody a sense of transience because they are made of organic materials or because they are traces of past actions and fleeting moments.
