I typically race through the Egyptian wing of the Metropolitan Museum (which one needs to walk through to reach the costume gallery) to avoid the schoolchildren gawking at the mummies and the droning docents accompanying them.  But this weekend I walked through in an entirely different spirit, mindful of the revolution in that country.  The statues, reliefs and small objects on display all seemed especially expressive.

During the protests in Cairo some foreigners expressed concern that the country wasn’t acting to preserve its artistic and archaeological treasures.  That’s an awfully high-handed perspective when one recalls how many ancient Egyptian artefacts are esconced, safely, in international museums.  Hopefully the country will find stability soon and the pieces in the Met’s galleries can one day be returned.

I first saw Damien Hirst’s cabinets ten years ago, in London, at Barmacy on a Friday night.  They were the perfect, kitschy and ridiculous background to the happy energy in the lounge. 

Seeing them again, this time at L&M Gallery on East 78th Street, they seemed awfully sinister.  The cabinets are constructed with unnerving precision, and the generically-labeled medicines and supplies inside are arrayed with a devastating, lifeless elegance.  There are half-gallon-size jars of codeine and sudafed, and boxes and boxes of prescription painkillers.  These are the things that keep us healthy. 

(Damien Hirst, The Existence of Nothing Causes Nothing, 1999.)

Most publicity about the powerful Paul Thek retrospective at the Whitney has focused on the “meat” pieces, tabletop assemblages that incorporate exquisitely rendered wax models of chunks of human and animal flesh.

Thek moved on from those works to more performance-oriented pieces, for which he crafted special props that fall somewhere between costume, furniture and sculpture.  Made from simple, recognizable elements like chairs, lumber and glass, they’re irrationally deformed and decorated so that they have an unsettling totemic power.  And yet, like a lot of Thek’s work, they have a certain innocence too.

(Paul Thek, Untitled (Sedan Chair), 1968. Wood, wax, paint, metal, leather, glass, and plaster.)