Art: Fluent, Electric, Charming

Jennifer Bartlett's work provides a key to '80s taste

In museums, the rotunda used to be where the sculpture went--bulls and Greeks, and the Hiram Powers slave chastely displaying her fetters to the white copy of the Apollo Belvedere. The Brooklyn Museum, scorning such conventions, has turned its rotunda into a boat show. It is full of small craft of every kind, antic parodies and phantoms of seaside fun, not one of which will float. There is a dory made of concrete and a small runabout, or rather the Platonic ghost of one, made of glass reinforced with wire mesh; a sailing dinghy made of sheet copper; and a trio...

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