In 2018, NASA launched the Parker Solar Probe, the first aircraft to fly through the sun’s upper atmosphere. It’s still up there, orbiting the sun, moving closer and closer, facing—as NASA’s website dramatically puts it—“brutal heat and radiation to provide humanity with unprecedented observations, visiting the only star we can study up close.”
A five-minute video of the rocket launching into the heavens is the first thing you see when you enter “Solid Gold,” the new exhibit that runs through July 6 at the Brooklyn Museum. This found footage sets the tone for an expansive, trippy show dedicated to the precious metal the Incas poetically called “the tears of the sun.” A pair of blindingly shiny outfits by the Belgian designer Walter Van Beirendonck stand nearby like sentries; they’re from his 2023 “Icarus” collection, named after the figure in Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun.
teamLab. Gold Waves, (2017). © teamLab, courtesy Pace Gallery.
About half of the show’s 500 objects come from the museum’s collection: ancient coins, Renaissance altar pieces, Japanese screens, shimmering couture dresses. The millennia-spanning exhibition commemorates the museum’s 200th birthday, a showcase for its vast holdings. “The idea came up about doing a show about one medium in the collection for its anniversary,” senior curator Matthew Yokobosky said during a preview last week. “And we had 4,000 works that are gold or have a gold element to them.”
But this isn’t some straightforward survey exhibition. It’s freewheeling, discursive, dizzying: jammed with many ideas and twinkling trinkets. “It is like looking at the sun,” Yokobosky mused. “Gold is always going to have some primordial attraction for us. We might not be able to verbalize why it is so dazzling, but it’s in there somewhere.” “Solid Gold” considers the subject in all its permutations: as an element, material, color, and symbol—of beauty, spirituality, wealth, and power, but also greed, hubris, and excess.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The story—as the Brooklyn Museum presents it, using and forgoing chronology per its discretion—starts a long, long time ago: when ancient peoples discovered these shiny yellow flecks in river beds and streams. It took thousands of years of water eroding the rock to produce these gold particles, but to its earliest fans, it must have seemed like magic.
The ancient Egyptians believed it to be the “flesh of the gods.” The bulk of the exhibit’s first gallery centers around Egypt’s gold obsession, spanning both genuine artifacts, like a coffin adorned with gold chains, as well as contemporary homages. I liked jeweler Gabby Elan’s golden grillz from the 2000s, but John Galliano’s draggy lamé-and-lurex Egyptomania costumes that he designed for Christian Dior in 2004 now read as cheesy (even compared with the ridiculous necklaces Elizabeth Taylor wore in the 1963 biopic Cleopatra). A 2020 Balenciaga number resembles a crumpled Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
The next room instructs viewers where gold comes from, the various (lucrative, often exploitative, and environmentally hazardous) ways we extract it, and how goldsmiths and artisans work with it. “You can do a lot with a little gold,” Yokobosky said. “It lasts forever. It doesn’t tarnish. It doesn’t rust. You can pound it and it doesn’t get brittle. It’s malleable. And it has so many meanings.”
Still, the metal never really shed its divine associations. Hindus crafted sculptures of their deities in gold. Muslims adorned their mosques and religious artifacts with it. Christians were initially skeptical of the stuff but then used gold leaf to give their altar pieces and holy pictures a heavenly glow. Some Catholic priests wore vestments woven from gold thread, to signal their godly status. There’s a stunning embroidered example from the mid-18th century; in the church’s dark candlelight it would have made its wearer glisten. In the dark ages, gold did provide sparkle and entertainment. Gleaming chalices, glimmering altarpieces, and illuminated prayer books made going to church a hell of a lot more interesting.
Nardo di Cione. Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Zenobius, John the Baptist, Reparata and John the Evangelist (mid-14th century). Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.
Gold “tinkles, it’s not static,” Yokobosky said. In a darkened chapel, “by the flickering of candlelight, it would have been like an early movie.”
Contemporary artists have played with gold’s religious associations in profound, sometimes subversive ways. The painter Titus Kaphar, for example, uses gold leaf for his luminous portraits of incarcerated Black men, painting them like Byzantine Christian icons. One of his diptychs is presented in “Solid Gold,” hanging in a dark room full of ground-gold religious paintings from Renaissance Italy. Later, past several rooms devoted to gold in fashion, in a spare white gallery, Marc Quinn’s 28-karat gold sculpture of Kate Moss in a pretzel-shaped yoga pose (Siren) sits among a smattering of Buddha sculptures—a new icon for our increasingly celebrity-worshiping culture.
Installation view, “Solid Gold. Brooklyn Museum, November 16, 2024- July 6, 2025. Photo: Paula Abreu Pita.
So much gold, however, can veer into bad taste. Among the oodles of jewelry and fashions, I couldn’t help but think of Trump’s gaudy gilded temples to greed and excess, of prankster Maurizio Cattelan’s golden toilet (entitled America), of the chemicals factories use to produce cheap sequins for mass-produced clothes and costumes. That’s the fascinating thing about gold. On one hand, it’s rare, precious, beautiful, everlasting. On the other, it’s kind of tacky. “Solid Gold” features some transcendent works of art and some ersatz trash. But that’s okay, even correct.
Hanging, France or Italy (circa 17th century). Silk, gilt metal, silver, and linen. Brooklyn Museum
There were two pieces in the show that wonderfully illustrated this tension between gold’s loftiness and its baseness. One was Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mixed-media sculpture Golden Venus of the Rags, from the late 1960s—featuring, yes, a golden statue of the goddess facing a pile of discarded clothing. The other was a draped silk ensemble by Canadian designer Claudio Cina, featuring a digitally printed collage of classical sculptures set against a background inspired by the swimming pool tiles of the famously overly-ostentatious Hearst Castle.
Yokobosky agreed: “When I saw that, I was like, ‘This is perfect!'”