The Smithsonian Institution has a resolutely populist mission: to offer free educational experiences to everyone who walks through its doors, often to first-time museumgoers who are visitors to the nation’s capital. So it is not surprising that curator Nora Atkinson has initiated her tenure at the Renwick with her first major show: a large-scale exhibition on the countercultural desert festival known as Burning Man, which attracts thousands of attendees, and is held each year for a week in Black Rock, Nevada. The first show to examine this genre, No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man is an exhibition that is resolutely welcoming and unapologetically anti-elitist. But even more germane to these pages, it is also a show about craft, particularly the production of the handmade that eschews the studio craft model that has been the staple of the Renwick’s collections and exhibition history since its establishment in 1972 by Lloyd Herman, the museum’s founding director. (It is pleasingly ironic that Atkinson is the Lloyd Herman Curator, holding the curatorial position endowed in his honor.) No Spectators is a remarkable achievement, marked first and foremost by its foresight, with a finger on the pulse of rapid cultural change, capturing its artistic production, and second, by its popularity. Former Renwick curator Nicholas Bell’s sculpture exhibition Wonder (2015) rekindled the building’s stodgy neoGeorgian galleries, complete with lines of people out the door, waiting to produce a bevy of selfies from within the large-scale immersive sculptures of Gabriel Dawe, Tara Donovan, and others. But make no mistake: Wonder is no match for No

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没有观众：火人节的艺术

史密森尼学会有一个坚定的民粹主义使命：为每一个走进它的大门的人提供免费的教育体验，通常是为第一次来到美国首都的博物馆参观者。因此，策展人诺拉·阿特金森 (Nora Atkinson) 以她的第一场大型展览开启了她在伦威克 (Renwick) 的任期也就不足为奇了：一场名为“火人节”的反主流文化沙漠节的大型展览，吸引了成千上万的观众，每年举办一次内华达州黑岩市的一周。第一个研究这种类型的展览，没有观众：火人节的艺术是一个坚决欢迎和毫无歉意地反精英主义的展览。但与这些页面更密切的是，它也是一场关于工艺的表演，特别是手工制作的作品，避开了工作室工艺模型，自 1972 年由博物馆的创始馆长劳埃德·赫尔曼 (Lloyd Herman) 创立以来，该模型一直是 Renwick 收藏和展览历史的主要内容。（具有讽刺意味的是，阿特金森是劳埃德赫尔曼策展人，担任他授予的策展人职位。）No Spectators 是一项了不起的成就，首先是其远见卓识，触动了快速文化变革的脉搏，捕捉它的艺术创作，其次是它的受欢迎程度。前 Renwick 策展人 Nicholas Bell 的雕塑展 Wonder (2015) 重新点燃了该建筑陈旧的新乔治亚画廊，门外排满了人，等待从 Gabriel Dawe、Tara Donovan 的大型沉浸式雕塑中拍摄一组自拍照，和别的。但请不要误会：Wonder 与 No 不相上下