12 It was hailed as a masterpiece the moment it appeared, back in 2012. Seven years later, the Guardian made it No. 1 on a list of the 25 best artworks of the 21st century. But the past 18 months have made Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation “The Visitors” more than just great; they have recast the work as a mirror for our current moment, making it seem breathtakingly prescient. Once in a while it happens that way: Certain artworks just rhyme with the zeitgeist. Manet’s “Olympia.” Picasso’s “Guernica.” Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans. Arthur Jafa’s “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” You can debate their merits as much as you like; what you can’t deny is the charge they get from mainlining something bigger in the culture at large. To see “The Visitors” as the world begins its tentative and fraught emergence from a still-evolving pandemic is to realize you are in the presence of just such a work. The way Kjartansson’s immersive exhibit echoes and distills our gradual, vaccine-assisted transition from prolonged isolation to summertime resumption of social life is uncanny. This oral history, the first in-depth account of how “The Visitors” came to be, tells the… Read full this story
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