Special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through November 4.
Visiting Tomás Saraceno's Cloud City, this summer's Met rooftop installation, inevitably provokes memories of Doug and Mike Starn's Big Bambú, the 2010 installation. Both are enormous structures that one can walk through; both encourage participants to seek new vantage points from which to view Central Park and the structure itself; and both come equipped with considerable academic-intellectual justifications of their artfulness.
But only with Big Bambú did I truly buy what that academic-intellectual justification was selling. The organically constructed, gorgeously chaotic Bambú stirred in me an aesthetic response, an emotional response, while the architectural Cloud leaves me cold. Cloud is undoubtedly cool—it's "participatory" and fun to tromp around in—but unlike Bambú (also "participatory" and fun), it doesn't seem to transcend that kind of shallow experience. No matter what kind of big words you use to describe it, it's still just a high-end jungle gym for grown-ups.
Much Review About Nothing 