Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston's Filthy Lucre

Filthy Lucre, an immersive installation by painter Darren Waterston, reimagines James McNeill Whistler’s famed Peacock Room—an icon of American art—as a decadent ruin collapsing under the weight of its own creative excess. Forging a link between inventive and destructive forces, Filthy Lucre forms the centerpiece of an unprecedented exhibition that highlights the complicated tensions between art and money, ego and patronage, and acts of creative expression in the nineteenth century and today.

Whether you go or not, Darren Waterston: Filthy Lucre tells the story of the contemporary reimagining of James McNeill Whistler’s decorative masterpiece Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Peacock Room. Waterston reconstructs the historical room as a sumptuous ruin, replete with reinterpretations of Whistler’s paintings and 250 hand-painted vessels. This title features all-new photography of Whistler’s and Waterston’s rooms, accompanied by essays by their curators and a scholar of patronage.