If you studied art history or another of the humanities in the 1990s or 2000s, say, if you’re around the age of Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, 45, you may remember the word “troublemaker” from your seminary days long ago. time. Back then she was a fashionable noun, borrowed from French, which described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. Soon, however, like so many other efforts to think critically, “the problematic” was left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to displacement. These days we encounter “troublesome” exclusively as an adjective: an off-the-cuff judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker who doesn’t mind precision.

A whole cast of professional art workers (curators, designers, guards, technicians) have been hired to produce “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso after Hannah Gadsby”, a small exhibition that opens Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. (It’s such a silly title I can’t even type it; I’m cutting and pasting.) The show, one of many scheduled around the world for the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death in 1973, is essentially light diversion that follows to “Nanette,” a 2018 Netflix special. In that routine, a kind of mix of stand-up and TED Talk, Gadsby said he “just graduated from an art history degree,” at the undergraduate level, and tried to knock down the Spanish artist: “It’s rotten in the face cavity! I hate Picasso! I hate him!” Now this animator has walked through the museum doors, but if you thought Gadsby had something to say about Picasso, the joke, the only good joke of the day, is actually for you.

Like the noun-turned-adjective “troublesome,” this new exhibition moves away from looking closely at the affirmative comforts of social justice-themed pop culture. At the Brooklyn Museum you’ll find a few (very few) Picasso paintings, plus two small sculptures and a selection of works on paper, suffixed with meek Gadsby jokes on adjacent labels. Surrounding and nearby are works of art made by women, almost all made after Picasso’s death in 1973; finally, in a hallway, clips of “Nanette” play on a loop. That’s the whole show, and anyone expecting this to be a Netflix takedown of the Degenerate Art Show, with poor patriarchal Picasso as a ritualized scapegoat, rest easy. There is little to see. There is no catalog to read. The ambitions here are on a GIF level, though perhaps that’s the point.

Insofar as it has an argument, a problematic — goes like this: Pablo Picasso was an important artist. He was also something of a jerk with women. And women are more than “goddesses or doormats”, as Picasso brutally put it; women also have stories to tell. I wish there was more to tell you about, but that’s about it. All the feminist scholarship of the last 50 years—on repressed desire, on phallic instability, or even on the lives of the women Picasso loved—is cast aside, in favor of what really matters: your feelings. “Admiration and anger can coexist”, a text reassures us at the entrance to the exhibition.

That Picasso, probably the painter that has been written about the most in history, was both a great artist and a not-so-great guy is so far from being news as to qualify it as climate. what matters is What are you doing with that rub, and “It’s Pablo-matic” doesn’t do much good. For starters, it doesn’t gather a lot of things to look at. The actual number of Picasso’s paintings here is only eight. Seven were borrowed from the Musée Picasso in Paris, which has been supporting exhibitions around the world for this anniversary; one belongs to the Brooklyn Museum; none is first class. There are no other institutional loans besides a few prints washed down the river from MoMA. What you’ll see here from Picasso are mostly modest etchings, and even these barely show his stylistic breadth; more than two dozen sheets come from a single portfolio, the Neoclassical Vollard Suite from the 1930s.

The unsigned texts in each gallery provide basic invocations of gender discrimination in art museums, or the colonial legacy of modern European art, while alongside the individual works, Gadsby offers signed jokes. These tags work a bit like bathroom graffiti, or maybe Instagram captions. Next to a classic print of Picasso and his lover Marie-Thérèse Walter: “I am so virile that my chest hair exploded.” Next to a reclining nude: “Is she really reclining? Or did she just fall from a great height?

There is a fixation, at all times, on the genitals and bodily functions. Each sphincter, each phallus, is called with adolescent excitement; with teen vocabulary, too. What jokes there are (“Meta? I barely know her!”) are still juvenile enough to leave Picasso unscathed. The adults involved in the Brooklyn Museum (mainly its senior curators Lisa Small and Catherine Morris, Gadsby’s collaborators here) really could have reined in this immaturity, though to their credit, they’ve at least fleshed out the show with some context about the cult. . of male genius or the rise of feminist art history in the 1970s.

The problem is obvious and entirely symptomatic of our digital lives turned upside down: for this show reactions came first, the objects reacted to the second. A Show That Started With Images May Make You Wonder: Following the Pioneering Feminist Art Historian cute nochlin —why Picasso’s paintings of women are generally devoid of desire, unlike the perverted paintings of Balthus, Picabia, and other cancelable mid-century gentlemen. A show properly committed to feminism and the avant-garde could have turned to Lyubov Popova, Natalia Goncharova, Nadezhda Udaltsova or Olga Rozanova: the notable Soviet women artists who put Picasso’s decomposition of forms at the service of the political revolution. A more serious look at male reputation and genius might have presented a work of at least one cubist woman: perhaps Alice Bailly, Marie Vassilieff, Alice Halicka, Marie Laurencin, Jeanne Rij-Rousseau, Maria Blanchard or even Australia’s own Anne Dangar.

Instead, “It’s Pablo-matic” is content to include works by women from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection. These appear to have been selected more or less at random and include a lithograph by Käthe Kollwitz, a photograph by Ana Mendieta, a cosmage by Betye Saar, and “Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman” by Dara Birnbaum, a video art classic from 1978/79 whose connection to Picasso is beyond me. (At least two paintings here, by Nina Chanel Abney and Mickalene Thomas, take inspiration from the example of Manet, not Picasso.) The artists who made them have here been reduced, in what may be the only real insult of this show, to mere narrators of women’s lives. “I want my story to be heard,” reads a quote from Gadsby in the last gallery; the same label hails the “brand new stories” of a new generation.

This elevation of “stories” over art (or at least comedy) was the main impetus behind “Nanette,” a Sydney stand-up routine that became an American viral hit during the last presidency, shortly after that Harvey Weinstein’s misdeeds would finally be exposed. . “Nanette” proposed a therapeutic purpose for culture, rejecting the “trauma” of telling jokes in favor of the three-act resolution of “stories.” He directly compared Picasso to then-President Trump: “The greatest artist of the 20th century. Let’s make art great again, guys.” He even went so far as to state that Picasso, and by extension all the Old Masters, suffered from “the mental illness of misogyny”. (Given this pathologization of Picasso, it is very Intriguing that Gadsby has described the Brooklyn Museum exhibition as his own deeply desired act of sexual violence against the man from Malaga, saying variety:: “I really, really want to hit him with one”).

The strangest thing is that the routine was based on a condemnation of art as an elite scam, and modernism made it particularly difficult. “CUUU-bism,” was Gadsby’s mocking refrain, to reliable laughter from the audience. (As it is, Picasso’s own Cubist art appears in the Brooklyn Museum via a single 6 x 4.5-inch print.) The sarcasm, from a comedian with moderate bona fides in art history, served a purpose: he gave Gadsby’s audience permission to think the avant-garde painting was actually a big rip-off. “Everyone is cut from the same cloth,” Gadsby told the audience on “Nanette”: “Donald Trump, Pablo Picasso, Harvey Weinstein,” and art you never liked in the first place could be dismissed as the farce of a cabal. wicked men.

Not long ago, it would have been embarrassing for adults to admit that they found avant-garde painting too difficult and preferred the comforts of story time. What Gadsby did was give the audience permission: moral permission: turn your back on what challenged you and ennoble a preference for comfort and kitsch.

So who should be more upset about this show? Not Picasso, who emerges totally unscathed. But the women artists in the museum’s collection were forced into this minor joke, and generations of feminist women and art historians… rosalinda krauss, Anna Wagner, mary ann caws, hundreds more, who have spent their careers thinking seriously about modern art and genre. Especially at the Brooklyn Museum, whose commitment to feminist art is unique in New York, I left saddened and ashamed that this show doesn’t even try to do what it promises: put women artists on an equal footing with the big guy.

“My story has value,” said Gadsby in “Nanette”; and then, “I will not allow my story to be destroyed”; and then, “Stories Have Our Cure.” But Howardena Pindell, featured here, is much more than a storyteller; Cindy Sherman, shown here, is much more than a storyteller. They are artists who, like Picasso before them, put ideas and images in productive tension, without guarantees of closure or comfort. The function of a public museum (or at least it should be) is to introduce us to all the complete aesthetic achievements of these women; there is also space for story time, in the children’s wing.

It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso after Hannah Gadsby
from June 2 to September 24, the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.