But it's difficult to describe how excruciatingly, irritatingly tedious and vacuous his stuff at Harvard is. The show is dominated by a long table that has pots brimming with black paint and cast models of the Le Corbusier–designed Carpenter Center building. The models are stuck on sticks, like popsicles. Corbu Pops, get it? At the opening there was a performance: people in ugly baby-face rubber masks and black Corbusier-style glasses moaned and cried and laughed and spoke gibberish.
For a number of years now, it's been trendy for artists to create new site-specific projects that tap into the history or the nature of the sites where they're exhibiting. Too often, these artists engage with the place in a shallow, cursory way that feels worse than if they hadn't bothered at all. Here Pope.L combines the worst of empty site-specific art with the worst of neo-Dada. The year's still young, but this one leads the field for Lousiest Show of 2009.
Read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
Related:
Bang bang, Pushing up daisies, Discotechnique, More 
- Bang bang
Misaki Kawai's new solo show marks the Boston debut of her two-dimensional works and the first opportunity for New England audiences to see her as a bona fide painter. Opening February 21 at LaMontagne Gallery, " Misaki Kawai : Kung Fu Forest."
- Pushing up daisies
If the phrase "April showers bring May flowers" has any cred, it might ring true with a new installation at Boston Sculptors Gallery.
- Discotechnique
Break out your hottest moves — a forthcoming exhibition in South Boston asserts that the path to abstraction could go through dancing.
- Weather reports
One of the great themes in America is nostalgia for the "good old days," which flame into being and then fade into the distance.
- On the move
Boston’s fall art season is in full swing, and contemporary spaces all over the city are eager to follow up on their fall kickoff shows.
- The Apocalypse versus stupid human tricks
Among the most poetic and moving artwork to come out of 9/11 is Paul Chan’s series of videos The 7 Lights .
- Slideshow: ''Say You Love Me'' at Harvard's Carpenter Center; ''Hungry for Death: Destroy All Monsters'' at BU Art Gallery
Through December 22, 2011
- Scavenged sculpture and Dead Sea scrolls: 10 heady spring exhibits blooming in New England galleries
In Barry McGee's art, you'll find traces of influences lifted from thrift stores, tramp art, skating, punk, surfing, and Bay Area murals and psychedelia.
- Boston arts institutions flexed their muscles in 2011
The following rundown of the best art exhibits of 2011 shows how greater Boston is now consistently offering some of the richest institutional art exhibition programs in the country.
- Fringe festival
Off the beaten path, the fringes of Boston's gallery scene are seeing new development, and even expansion.
- Review: Andrew Witkin, Doug Weathersby
Over the summer, José Luis Blondet, curator at the Boston Center for the Arts, invited Boston artist Andrew Witkin to do an unspecified project in a hidden corridor at the BCA's Mills Gallery.
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Museum And Gallery
, Harvard University, Institute of Contemporary Art, carpenter center, More
, Harvard University, Institute of Contemporary Art, carpenter center, carpenter center, Gustav Stickley, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cultural Institutions and Parks, Museums, Museum of Fine Arts, Cindy Sherman, Less
