★★★★★
This Rothko show is a revelation. It shouldn’t work here, at the flashy, shiny, white, white, white Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, but it does, brilliantly. After practically every room you are thrown out onto blinding bright stairways before you plunge into the gallery darkness again. Eyes reset, it takes a moment to get used to the gloom. Then the Rothkos flicker to life like fires in a cave.
In political commentary there’s a tendency to “whataboutery”. I don’t know how to solve this intransigent issue, so I’ll counter with another. In art you get “I-could-do-that-ery”. Or its near relation, “my-kid-could-do-that-ery”. Pollock’s splatters. Mondrian’s squares. Rothko’s rectangles. “Interior decoration,” they’ll say. “Paint swatches.” “Blobs.” But I’m telling you now, in the afterglow of this
