Contemporary gallerists preparing for the upcoming season of international art fairs find themselves paralyzed by a profound epistemological crisis. Exhibitors are intensely debating whether to coddle the delicate sensibilities of their clientele with a solo presentation, or to risk total psychological rupture by introducing the terrifying specter of a second artist.
The agonizing calculus, debated in hushed, reverent tones in Chelsea boardrooms and Swiss exhibition halls, hinges upon the prevailing assumption that the modern collector cannot endure the juxtaposition of competing visual vocabularies. To place a geometric abstraction within the same peripheral vision as a figurative bronze is, we are told, an act of sheer perceptual violence; it is a curatorial recklessness that threatens to completely overwhelm the fragile, translucent circuitry of the buyer's mind.
One cannot help but marvel at how far we have retreated from the polyphonic visual feasts of our forebears, a historical trajectory that spans from the teeming, hallucinatory multitudes of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, through the claustrophobic, politically fraught density of the forgotten Yugoslav pavilion at the 1968 Venice Biennale, straight down to the sticky laminates of the 1997 Rainforest Cafe menu, which boldly demanded its readers synthesize the existence of mechanical gorillas and volcano-themed desserts simultaneously. Today's gallerist, it seems, possesses none of this curatorial courage, preferring instead to quarantine a single creator in a white-walled sensory deprivation tank lest the viewer be forced to synthesize two disparate thoughts before lunch.
We have discovered that if a patron looks at a ceramic vase and then turns her head to encounter an oil painting by a completely unrelated human being, the ensuing cognitive dissonance frequently causes her to forget her own PIN number.
Thus, the solo booth emerges not as a triumph of curatorial focus, but as a tragic concession to an audience for whom the mere existence of multiplicity is a traumatic event. We are left to wander these cavernous exhibition halls, spoon-fed our aesthetic experiences one carefully isolated morsel at a time, mercifully spared the harrowing, supposedly insurmountable burden of having to glance slightly to the left to see something else.