Alec Soth’s Fondation Pierre Berge and Yves Saint Laurent, Moujik IV, Paris, 2007, courtesy of Weinstein Gallery
Embarrassment of Riches
September 2010
In 2007 curator David E. Little was flipping through a
magazine when he saw a Louis Vuitton ad featuring Mikhail Gorbachev in
the back of a limo. On the seat beside him was one of capitalist
society’s most recognizable status symbols: a logo-covered LV bag.
Visible out the window were the remains of the Berlin Wall. “I thought,
What is going on here?” remembers Little. “In the Eighties who could
have ever imagined this?” What was going on, of course, was the
unprecedented accumulation of wealth that defined the first years of the
21st century. Spurred on by the idea of Gorbachev as luxury spokesmodel,
Little set out to explore that topic through photography and video art.
The works included in the resulting show, “Embarrassment of Riches,” at
the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (September 17 to January 2), range
from glamour shots—like a selection from Jacqueline Hassink’s series of
haute couture fitting rooms and Martin Parr’s deadpan depiction of
spectators at a Dubai polo match—to wistful vistas of Canadian oil
fields and Chinese building sites. One of the most provocative is Luc
Delahaye’s A Lunch at the Belvedere (2004), a photograph of a World
Economic Forum meeting digitally manipulated to resemble The Last
Supper. Delahaye transformed a round table into a long one, placing
billionaire financier George Soros at its center. “We now live in a
world where debates about ideology have been replaced by debates about
currency,” says Little. Little planned “Embarrassment of Riches” before
the financial meltdown; once it hit, he says, he worried that the show
“would be dead.” But rather than render the works irrelevant, the
current situation lends emotional weight. Looking at pieces like Andreas
Gursky’s Cocoon (2007), which features a throbbing crowd of carefree
revelers at a ridiculously over-the-top nightclub in Frankfurt, one
can’t help but think of Rome before the fall.
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