Stockholm is too small for Moderna Museet

Mighty Jupiter, brightest in the night sky, it’s gravitational pull turns dull matter to moons or to crashing comets. A single dominant force in the great (or smaller) chain of being, that outshines the rest and whose vast mass radiates heat. A perhaps unfair description of Sweden’s largest art institution but when the Museum puts on a show the heavens quake.

Who couldn’t like the recent show of Dali at the Moderna Museet? It was a wonderful grandiose affair with months of research behind it, a fine selection of major works and wonderful vignettes of the artist ‘s later years replete with all his self aggrandising lunacy and public relations savvy. A lavish catalogue with essays from such notables as Hal Foster and Chrissie Iles added to the mix. Dali shone brilliantly not like a diamond but a like polished plastic turd placed on the table of the Swedish royal family at the Nobel Prize dinner.

But the questions that puzzle are why Dali in Stockholm? Why now? Why at Moderna Museet? The museum has a very limited selection of his works in its collection and apart from an excellent example of his 30’s painting The Enigma of Wilhelm Tell; there are no real surprises. So in terms of scholarship it is hard to see how the Dali exhibition emerges out of the museums own compendium or researched history. It might be a little unfair to point out the lack of Swedish authorities in a list of acknowledged Dali scholars that could include Felix Fanés, Ina Gibson, Gilles Neret, Elliot King and Dawn Ades, but I do it anyway. Although I do not doubt the curator John Peter Nilsson's acumen, he is certainly more established as a theorist of contemporary art than of art history from the last century. In a similar vein there is no significant connection between Stockholm and Dali, the 1973 exhibition of his works at Moderna that came from Louisiana Museum at Humlebeak being perhaps an exception. To be honest, an exhibition of Dali’s works makes considerably more sense in Barcelona, Paris, New York or even in Freudian Vienna but Social democratic Stockholm?

The addition of the parallel exhibition by Franceso Vezzoli, was of course an attempt to recontextualise Dali in a contemporary setting. I have no interest in criticising this part of the exhibition and it is irrelevant to the argument but I am still at a loss how this creates any greater urgency for the exhibition as a whole. The self-acclaimed doyen of the glitterati does not to my mind do anything to elucidate Dali. Rather I found the lack of genuine celebrity or deliberate shallowness to be more a black hole than shining star.

What I think emerges is also a basic question about the scale of shows like this and the status of the institutions that display them. The exhibition is ‘world class’ if one wants to use that type of designation, but is it too big for Stockholm? We might want to celebrate the fact that Moderna Museet produces exhibitions that can rank with anything produced in Paris or London but with that we also have to recognise how a single institution eclipses all others. The museum clearly dominates the presentation of contemporary art in Sweden; it receives the lion’s share of media attention and of course of financing. And although it may sound disingenuous or churlish to snipe at the money available to host such an exhibition, as Tensta Konsthall struggles with a tiny fraction of the sum, it is also hard not to feel a sense of inequity. Or perhaps more, the question of why Dali seems more pointed. To pay for the loan, insurance and transport of a couple of Dali’s works constitutes basically our yearly exhibition budget. So I do wonder is the presentation of these works of such art historical, or theoretical importance. The heavens may shake; the rest of Stockholm is thrown into the darkness of an eclipse and the turn styles turn and turn.