Critical Analysis
Barney's work has provoked strong critical reaction, both positive and negative. Calling his work a "snooze", The New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl criticized Barney as being "a star for attaining stardom."Another critic in the same magazine characterizes elements in Drawing Restraint 9 as "an unabashed display of Oriental kitsch that makes Memoirs of a Geisha look like an ethnographic documentary." Jed Perl has described Barney's work as "phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by Dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination".
Others have defended his work, comparing Barney to such canonical performance artists as Chris Burden and Vito Acconci and arguing that his art is simultaneously a critique and a celebration of commercialism and blockbuster filmmaking. Commenting on the Cremaster series' enigmatic nature, Alexandra Keller and Frazer Ward write:
| “ | "Rather than reading Cremaster, we are encouraged to consume it as high-end eye candy, whose symbolic system is available to us but hardly necessary to our pleasure: meaning, that is, is no longer a necessary component to art production or reception. Left to its own devices-and it is all devices-Cremaster places us in a framework of mutually assured consumption, consuming us as we consume it." | ” |
The philosopher Arthur C. Danto, well known for his work on aesthetics, has praised the majority of Barney's work, noting the importance of Barney's use of sign systems such as Mason mythology (see Freemasonry).
Others have asserted Barney's works are contemporary expressions of surrealism. In the words of Chris Chang, Barney's Cremaster films, though "completely arcane, hermetic and solipsistic ... nevertheless periodically provide some of the most enigmatically beautiful experimental film imagery you'll ever see."
"Is Barney's work a new beginning for a new century?", asks Richard Lacayo, writing in Time. "It feels more like a very energetic longing for a beginning, in which all kinds of imagery have been put to the service of one man's intricate fantasy of return to the womb. Something lovely and exasperating is forever in formation there. Will he ever give birth?"
Barney's work for the 2007 Manchester International Festival received mixed reviews.
"Barney is the real thing. When he brings his boundless imagination to a subject he goes down to its depths to create images and implant ideas that stay in your mind for ever" writes Richard Dorment in the Telegraph.
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