Cai Guo-Qiang Time: Dueling Magazine Profiles; MASS MoCA Snub

Cai Guo-Qiang, "Inopportune: Stage One," 2004, at MASS MoCA
The Guggenheim's Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe retrospective doesn't open until Friday, but already the big guns of art journalism have jumped the gun with major profiles of the gunpowder king---Arthur Lubow in yesterday's NY Times Magazine and Peter Schjeldahl in next week's New Yorker (online now).
But there seems to be a news blackout on the fact that the original version of the much discussed centerpiece for the show---a succession of identical automobiles, emanating sparks as they hurtle through the Guggenheim's rotunda---was created for a wide-ranging 2004-05 exhibition, Cai Guo-Qiang: Inopportune at MASS MoCA, North Adams. That first version of the car-bomb piece (above) was later acquired by the Seattle Art Museum for the entrance lobby of its new building.
Even the website of the exhibition's lead sponsor, the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation (where Cai is an "honorary advisor"), snubs MASS MoCA's pioneering show, while citing the artist's projects at the Metropolitan Museum and the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin.
The upcoming New York show was "designed," according to the Guggenheim's press release "as a site-specific installation."
So was its uncredited precursor at MASS MoCA.
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LEE ROSENBAUM I'm a veteran cultural journalist with many pieces in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and major art magazines. I have been a cultural contributor on New York Public Radio (WNYC and WQXR) and have provided arts commentary on NPR and public radio stations in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. I am a HuffPost Arts writer. I've been profiled on the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer's Art Beat and in the Chicago Reader. I've appeared as an art-market commentator on BBC-TV and have published numerous Op-Ed pieces in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. I am author of The Complete Guide to Collecting Art (Knopf) and have lectured on cultural property issues at the New Acropolis Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, on deaccessioning at at Investigative Reporters and Editors 2011 Annual Meeting, Columbia Law School, the University of Iowa and a conference of the Museum Association of New York, on museum governance and cultural property issues at Seton Hall University, on arts blogging at American University and on Smithsonian exhibition controversies at Rutgers University.
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