Day and night throughout Miami Art Week, Es Devlin’s installation The Library of Us
drew crowds to the beach behind the Faena hotel. An enormous, metal tower of bookshelves, set in the middle of a reflective pool, rotates like a sundial. A scrolling LED panel displays an assortment of bookish quotes and phrases. At appointed times, visitors are invited to sit and read on a rotating platform. Inside the Faena hotel lobby, a long bench with built in bookshelves, populated with an eclectic selection of volumes, provides more reading space.
But in today’s age of Instagram art, visitors instead pose for photos while pretending to read, as if enacting a strange historical ritual. For a work that is supposed to inspire people to value books, it was disappointing to see the library tower itself, isolated in the reflecting pool, off limits to visitors. Conventional libraries inspire because they invite casual browsing and the potential to discover something unexpected.
The Library generated lots of buzz, not all positive, from critics this past week. Blake Gopnik panned it in a Facebook post with a list of adjectives, including “pretentious,” “goofy,” “illiterate,” “elitist,” and “just plain BAD.”
Nevertheless, the work was successful in attracting visitors to interact in their own way–taking selfies, walking on the beach, being scolded by security personnel for standing where they shouldn’t. After a while, they would be drawn towards the water. Indeed, “art can’t compete with the ocean,” noted Valentina Di Liscia in Hyperallergic. In the end, nature dwarfs any temporary Art Week installation (which may, intended or not, be the point).
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