# @hyperallergic on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DNQZA2oAAfG
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/33969652-hyperallergic-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/4f3abd1dd7.jpg
- **Posted:** 2025-08-12T13:09:17.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Hyperallergic (@hyperallergic) — https://gondola.cc/hyperallergic

## Caption

With all the cruelty of the world right in our faces, is Diane Arbus’s bleak style of confrontational art what we need in this moment? 

The 20th-century American photographer's largest retrospective to date, currently on view at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, left hakimbishara disappointed. Curated by Matthieu Humery, “Constellation” comprises 455 prints spanning Arbus’s 15-year art career installed on a labyrinth of black scaffolding. Despite their volume and scope, reflecting several periods of the artist’s development, the prints are displayed in no particular order, neither chronological nor thematic. Visitors wander through a dimly lit maze of randomly hung photographs, carelessly bundling together distinctly different subject matter — a mélange of Upper Manhattan bourgeois couples, carnival workers, nudist hippies, and “woman impersonators” — with zero context apart from a terse timeline of the artist’s life on a wall outside the exhibition. 

Humery, who once pronounced, “I do not really consider myself as a curator,” explained in an interview with the Guardian that he “tried to keep out any kind of narratives so that visitors create their own narratives.” This is either lazy, ahistorical curation or an intentional attempt to disorient viewers and distract them from inconvenient questions about Arbus’s art. It’s hard to form a critical opinion about a body of work when you’re overwhelmed by hundreds of photos without a morsel of context, even if many of the faces are familiar.

Read the full review by hakimbishara at the link in bio. 
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1 - A projection outside “Diane Arbus: Constellation at Park Avenue Armory” in New York (photo Hakim Bishara/Hyperallergic)

#DianeArbus #ParkAvenueArmory #ArtCriticism #Photography

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## Tags

artcriticism, photography, parkavenuearmory, dianearbus

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