The best thing about the exhibition “John Baldessari: Pure Beauty” is that the exit is a short jaunt from “The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,” a major survey of paintings, sculptures, decorative ware, jewelry, and textiles from the Yuan Dynasty, founded by the Mongolian emperor Khubilai Khan (1271–1368). Spanning from the year of his birth to the Ming ascension of power, “The World of Khubilai Khan” is relentless in its array of splendors, as if everything Chinese artisans put their hands on turned to gold and, in some cases, “cloths of gold”—the name European explorers gave to textiles woven with golden silk.
It’s an illusion of course: curatorial acumen accounts for putting the Yuan Dynasty’s best foot forward. Still, the exhibition’s astonishing artistic consistency is more real than not and gives pause, if only because of the culture which it was created boasted a political structure defined by foreign control and absolute power and a society rife with turmoil and inequity. Good for art, apparently; not so good for the average citizen. You’ve got to wonder: Is there an ideal state in which art and civilization can both prosper?
Beyond remarking on their common venue, it’s a stretch to divine a connection between the exquisite artifacts of a medieval monarchy and the fancies of a laconic gadfly who came into his own during Ronald Reagan’s governorship of California. But a note I took while meandering through “Pure Beauty”—“some artists are too