Ron Mueck, Annie Leibovitz, John Currin
Last Sunday, I saw two exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum: Ron Mueck and Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life, 1990-2005 . Mueck made puppets for children's television before moving to sculpture, while Leibovitz's photos first appeared in Rolling Stone , Vanity Fair and Vogue . Both artists thus began their careers in popular culture before they were taken up by the mainstream art world. Mueck creates very lifelike sculptures out of fibreglass and silicone, almost Madame Tussaud, except they are much bigger or smaller than life-size. I liked The Spooning Couple , a small and delicate piece, in which the man and woman look so alone though lying down in that most intimate position. The other piece that held my attention was that of a young adolescent boy squatting down and looking sideways at himself in a mirror. It seems to capture so subtly youth's vulnerability. I did not find the other pieces interesting. Too often I had the impression that technique overwhelmed th...