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Right in the middle of the exhibition \u201cGiants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,\u201d which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley\u2019s 25-foot-long 2008 painting \u201cFemme Piqu\u00e9e par un Serpent.\u201d Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wiley\u2019s signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture<\/a> by Auguste Cl\u00e9singer. What you think of it really depends on what you\u2019re asking for.<\/p>\n If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley\u2019s ongoing project, his decades-long attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, it\u2019s one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, it\u2019s visually appealing, and even today, when it\u2019s no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.<\/p>\n On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, \u201cFemme Piqu\u00e9e par un Serpent\u201d (\u201cWoman Bitten by a Serpent\u201d) doesn\u2019t offer that much. There are no details that you\u2019d miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. It\u2019s simply the adept illustration of an idea.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Of course, you could also ask for both \u2014 for a clear conceptual work about<\/em> painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good<\/em> painting. If you do, you\u2019re likely to respond to \u201cFemme Piqu\u00e9e par un Serpent\u201d with ambivalence and frustration.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n I was thinking about this \u2014 about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time \u2014 as I walked through \u201cGiants,\u201d the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (\u201cSpike Lee: Creative Sources\u201d closes on Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) \u201cGiants\u201d draws on the extensive art collection of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works \u2014 many oversized and of recent vintage \u2014 by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes<\/a>, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood,<\/a> born in 1996.<\/p>\n Stylistically, however, it would be hard to imagine a more narrowly focused show. That nearly all the faces are Black, or that wherever there\u2019s a political subtext, it involves an issue of special concern to Black Americans, is great. But that the work is also nearly all figurative, that so much of it is of a similar size, made with similar colors, composed in the same way and hung in the same way, is not so great. So many superficial resemblances have a flattening effect. It becomes hard to appreciate the nuance, or individuality, of a piece that at first blush looks like just a greener or redder version of the piece to its left.<\/p>\n If you can tune out this flattening effect, you will find quite a few excellent artworks from the collection. (The show is in the museum\u2019s special exhibition space on the ground floor, which means you will also have to pay $25 per adult to get in.) They include vibrant paintings that the South African artist, Esther Mahlangu<\/a>, makes with traditional Ndebele house patterns; Arthur Jafa\u2019s<\/a> overwhelming, 7,000-pound truck-tire sculpture \u201cBig Wheel I\u201d; a rich, room-size polyptych by Meleko Mokgosi<\/a>; and 14 charming, oval and round landscapes of Jamaica by Barkley L. Hendricks<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a whole wall of black and white photographs by Gordon Parks<\/a>, including both well-known images of Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Langston Hughes and sensitive photographs of less famous faces, and a facing wall of Jamel Shabazz\u2019s more candid color photographs of well-dressed Brooklynites and early hip-hop pioneers. Deana Lawson\u2019s oversize staged photos of domestic interiors, hung together on yet another wall, are as unnerving and powerful as ever. These all would have been more effective hung around the exhibit instead of crammed together in a commercial-looking display, but the photographs themselves rarely miss.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n A soundsuit by Nick Cave<\/a> is reliably delightful, as is Jordan Casteel\u2019s<\/a> portrait of the clothing designer Fallou Wadje selling T-shirts in Harlem, and Hank Willis Thomas<\/a> contributes an incisive 2017 textile piece called \u201cYou Shouldn\u2019t Be the Prisoner of Your Own Ideas (LeWitt).\u201d An eight-foot square of green and white stripes with an X in the middle, it\u2019s made of decommissioned prison uniforms.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Before you get to any of this, however, you have to pass through a kind of shrine to the collectors.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a larger-than-life photograph of Keys and Beatz in formal wear, posing with a BMX bike. And several actual bikes from Beatz\u2019s collection. And his turntables. And the piano Keys used in her 2014 video \u201cWe Are Here.\u201d And portraits of the couple by Wiley, Derrick Adams and Shabazz, who shot them re-enacting a somber 1970 Gordon Parks photo of the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver with his wife, Kathleen, in Algeria. Once you do get to the art, you\u2019ll find it interspersed with little lounge areas surrounded by Bang & Olufsen speakers, the couple\u2019s preferred brand, playing a special playlist compiled by Beatz, as if the couple had invited you to one of their houses to see what was on their walls.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n