Posted inArt

What Makes a Blockbuster?

After a plate of lukewarm gemelli in the Metropolitan Museum cafeteria, an out-of-town friend and I wandered haphazardly into the lower level of the Lehman wing, where the exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay has been in residence since early October. The show, which consists primarily of terra-cotta studies and drawings that Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) made for his Baroque marble extravaganzas, wasn’t at the top of my list, especially on a Friday night with an hour left to go before the museum closed, and especially after reading The New York Times review by Ken Johnson, who called it “an important exhibition, insofar as it establishes a scholarly baseline for the study of Bernini terra-cotta work.” Not exactly a line that quickened the pulse.