The exhibition’s most striking encounter is the one that Arsham stages between classical statuary and Pokémon, the latter of which marks the first major collaboration between a contemporary artist and the storied Pokémon company. Here, both are subjected to the artist’s signature decay. It’s as if he were enacting the half-life of these icons: trophies, meet entropy. The classical works are drawn from Arsham’s collaboration with the august RMN-Grand Palais, in Paris (also featured in his exhibition “Moonraker” at the Musée Guimet), while Pokémon is Pokémon. Two different cultural universes, in a high- low, head-on crash. Or is it a crossroads? Two trajectories arriving to the same point: ancient sculpture is so venerated that it has become cliché, the stuff of museum gift shops, while the creatures of Pokémon, which seem to be influenced by Japanese mythology, have morphed into their own 21st century version of the sacred.
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