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On this holiday Monday, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has special opening hours, and it would be a great time to catch up on the myriad special exhibtions, such as Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings. While I've written previously about AngloMania, the Cai Guo-Qiang on the roof as well as the Susan Sontag show, Treasures of Sacred Maya Kings has received accordingly little attention. In a city with hundreds of thousands of immigrants from all over Central America, the gauge of general interest in the great civilizations from Chaco to the Olmec and Maya remains startlingly low. It's also rather unfortunate that the New York Times dispatched Holland Cotter to review the show, because his usual rambling, discursive and at times downright hoky tone does little to highlight or explicate the fascinating objects on view. For example, why write: Certain items — a jadeite model of a pointed tool used for ritual self-mutilation — are just strange. We know from scholarly research of the past 30 years that ritual objects such as these played a very important role in Mayan society, particularly where the upper monarchy was concerned. And I am reminded of my grandmother when I read: Once you introduce the strange and the unbeautiful to a treasures show, you create some confusion; you upset expectations, ruffle the aesthetic pleasure principle. I do pity the poor fellow, for his aesthetic sensibility has apparently been jaded by this jade.
But let's get serious. The show was organized by LACMA curator Virginia Fields, and more than 70 pieces are on display for the first time in the United States. Throughout the reign of the Maya in southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras, the notion of divine kingship was all-pervasive. Consequently, ritual objects should very much be part of such an exhibit. Who could imagine an exhibit of sacred Tibetan relics, for example, without a bejeweled ritual dagger that depicts fierce deities on multiple sides? While Cotter's reviews of Himalayan art also tend to be chatty and superficial, it cannot be overlooked that a certain level of ethnocentrism exists in American scholarship about arts of the Americas that we Americans have to confront. It cannot suffice to sum one's sensibilities with: But the Maya show feels far less like a stroll past Bergdorf's than like a visit to an archaeological dig. That's simply denigrating, if not appalling. Even jaded art reporters on deadline ought to do better. One does indeed need to think about the context, and while a previous journey to the Yucatan peninsula surely assists many in visualizing this context, one could also make the journey on the Internet to explore these ancient city-states. Especially on the eve of the 230th anniversary of this country's revolution, we would be wise to examine the rise—and fall—of previous civilizations in our midst.
photo: Commemorative Monument (Stela 11), 200–50 B.C. Guatemala, Kaminaljuyu
Granite; 76 x 26 3/4 x 7 1/8 in. (193 x 67.9 x 18.1 cm) Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, Guatemala City
Tags:
AngloMania, belize, cai guo qiang, chaco, guatemala, honduras, maya, met, mexico, olmec, susan sontag, yucatan
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Posted on 7/3/2006
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