A photograph of Maurizio Cattelan hanging in the exhibit. Photo Credit: Jill Krementz.

Coming into the Guggenheim and seeing their latest art exhibit dangling from the ceiling is a bit unusual and overwhelming. Usually when viewing art, people look at every work individually which leaves time to think about it, but with Cattelan’s exhibition you have no choice but to take it all in at once. Maurizio Cattelan’s exhibit, Maurizio Cattelan: All, is on display until January 22nd. This of course is meant for the more cynical art lovers or the more open minded ones (and not the people in the middle) since Cattelan’s work is set on critiquing other artists. After this exhibition he said that he would be retiring, and who knows; maybe that’s for the best. A person who only has works that critique everyone else is most likely lacking the talent to create his own original artwork. Cattelan uses many artists and their works as examples to illustrate his main point; that nowadays anything can be considered art. He uses the character of Zorro from a very popular movie and takes his signature and shows it cut into the canvas as one example of mediocre art. Another example would be a broom put up against canvas creating folds. He also uses a lot of implicit as well as explicit disrespectful slang in his pieces. One example was when he put a cat, a donkey, a dog and a rooster on top of each other so of course after a while you realize what those animals are called in street slang and feel slightly offended. So if you are one of the people who enjoy this type of art criticism in art itself, I would highly recommend seeing this show; for others, not so much.