Art Review: “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” at the Metropolitan Museum

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Nancy Princenthal

An octopus frontlet made of gold, chrysocolla and shells dating from A.D. 300-600 Peru is featured in “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Credit Museo de la Nación, Lima, Ministerio de Cultura del Perú

NEW YORK CITY---With its cheerfully crowd-seeking title, “Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas,” the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of pre-Columbian art promises an unabashed celebration of splendor. Of course art, religion and extreme experience have consorted since the beginning of time, and continue to do so in the sculptures produced in what is now Mexico, where it is something of a relief to see figures in full interacting actively and expressively. Nothing about the 21st century’s vaunted cosmopolitanism would have surprised them. They might have been confused, though, by our tendency to look to history — non-European in particular — for a material record of lost innocence. [More]

Metropolitan Museum of Art: "Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas" (Through May 28, 2018); 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York; (212)535-7710, metmuseum.org.