Frank Gehry can kiss my ass

"Sketches of Frank Gehry" was playing at the Michigan Theater today, so I thought I would go see it. What a piece of crap. And not just the movie.

Don't get me wrong, I like architecture, and I like sculpture, and Gehry does a decent job of bridging the two, producing Architectural-Works-of-Art. And some of his buildings are truly beautiful. But so often they are just wrong. Bad and wrong. But few will say so, with the notable exception of Hal Foster, who makes a damn good point in his criticism, that there is a cult of adoration and few are willing to speak a disparaging word.

One of the most famous of his buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain is a beautiful and majestic thing. But it fails as an art museum. An art museum should not want to BE the art. It's not the purpose of the museum. Buildings must be functional on some level, and even if it's a beautiful work of art, it should enable the purpose of the building, not distract from that purpose. Otherwise, they should have just built the building and put nothing in it and let the building be the art.

One of the artists interviewed made a point of "if it distracts from the art, then maybe the art isn't good enough, eh?" Well, interviewed in his bathrobe with a snifter of cognac, wearing sunglasses, slouched in an antique chair, and filmed from below, all I can say is: when he doesn't have to pose for the camera, I'll consider his opinion to have documentary credibility. Until then, he's just a poseur.

The whole movie was essentially a Gehry love-in. A gushing sycophantic masturbatory affair. Go ahead and skip it, you'll be better off.