When the MET Gets Insecure - Baldessari's Pure Beauty Take Two

Last week I went to the Metropolitan to see the Baldessari retrospective for a second time (I first saw it at the Tate in London). The Tate had it better. Maybe because the British institution had more room, the MET show felt cluttered. But in their spatial restrictions, I was happy to see the curators presented more of the artist's earlier and less well-known work (such as Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt of 1972) rather than his 80s color dots on black and white footage. 

In their restrictions, however, they also decided on pretty much the pettiest of possible moves they could have done with Brain/Cloud (With Seascape and Palm Tree) from 2009 -  the image illustrates my post "Baldessari's Brain vs Koons's Penis". This installation is composed of a sculptural brain being filmed by a delayed low quality camera, giving the visitors the chance to see both the brain/cloud in reality and in a mediated reality themselves and the cloud/brain. For some reason - I heard rumors of weight - the MET didn't instal this work but still wanted to. Accordingly they went on presenting multiple flat large-scale reproductions of it as well as its illustration on all of the exhibit's published material.

Talk about being missing the point.

To forget how depressing it is when even the world's top museum is insecure about its collection and/or suggests a reproduction is sort of like the real when doing an exhibit on an artist who has perpetually made fun of such conventional ways of seeing:
Here is a little humor with John Baldessari's Baldessari Sings Sol Lewitt from 1972: