Heart Trouble

The Katonah (N.Y.) Museum’s “I [Heart] the Suburbs,” which closed yesterday, claimed that its portrait of the suburbs was "a rich and nuanced tapestry.” But if the show presented the suburbs in a way that wasn’t dripping with sarcasm and Special Sauce, we couldn’t find it in the coverage. The show included Robert Selwyn’s melting portrait of a Victorian house—“a sendup of picture-book planned communities,” according to a review of the show in The New York Times. The Times also cited a photograph of a man standing amid piles of debris in his backyard (“a piercing look at psychoburbia”) and Lee Stoetzel's installation, "McMansion 5," a house sided with Chicken McNuggets, with cup-lid windows and a roof of Quarter Pounder boxes.

The interest in the ironies in the works described seems strange for a museum located deep in the burbs north of Manhattan. The local paper, the Westchester Journal-News, found more ambiguity in the show than The Times did, but also ended up asking, in effect: If the suburban tapestry is so nuanced, why isn’t our view equally nuanced?