SANTA FE, N. Mex — All Art Is Virtual is the kind of catch-all title that made me wary even before I stepped into the dark and buzzing interior of Thoma Foundation’s new media space Art Vault. The nonprofit gallery’s website states that the exhibition “proposes that all art can provide a virtual reality experience — no special goggles required.”

I, too, dislike VR headsets (bad ergonomics aside, their aesthetic is iconically mortifying), but this theme sounds like an excuse to showcase pretty much anything in a new media collection. In that regard Thoma holds the goods, in vast archives that stretch back to some of the earliest examples of digital art. All Art Is Virtual features two dozen works spanning seven decades (its earliest entry is from 1962), but what’s the curatorial glue?

Mercifully, a sequence of narrative-driven works lends shape to an exhibition that has the potential to transcend its branding. A downtempo Nina Simone sets the tone, playing piano and crooning across 29 television screens in a pyramidal installation by Atlanta-based artist Paul Stephen Benjamin. The work is titled “Black is the Color” (2015) which is the lyric that echoes through it as three clips of Simone endlessly cycle. The singer’s drawn-out vocal steeps like tea, slowly resolving to the ear.

Nam June Paik’s 1989 work “Portable God,” a two-channel video installation enshrined in a 1950s television cabinet, is a psychedelic, calligraphy-covered altar to Allen Ginsburg, Elaine de Kooning, Confucius, and other cultural figures. Offerings such as rice and candles are poignantly perched on the piece.

Η συνέχεια εδώ.