Look, but don't think.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Consider this: New York art star Matthew Ritchie's big new work that's been installed at the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse is by far the most expensive single piece of public art ever to appear in Eugene.

With a $776,237 price tag - not including cost overruns still being negotiated - Ritchie's sprawling sculpture and light box installation has cost you and me more than half as much as all the public art ever bought by the city of Eugene combined. Add in smaller works by three other artists and the total bill for the courthouse art comes in a shade over $1 million.

The good news is, maybe now that we have spent a million bucks for art in one giant swipe of the national credit card, we can really start taking ourselves seriously as an art town.

But a nagging question remains: What, exactly, did we get for all that money? The answer is surprisingly complicated.

Ritchie, who was born in London but lives in New York, arrived in Eugene in 2003 with top art world credentials and no connection to Oregon. He was selected by the federal General Services Administration Art in Architecture Program, which maintains lists of nationally prominent artists to draw on for projects such as this one.

The process is designed to keep smaller communities from marring national buildings with mediocre art - something that might well have happened here, given Judge Michael Hogan's well known propensity for kitschy paintings of eagles. (After initial shock, the judge, who spearheaded the courthouse project, has come around to endorsing the artist's selection.)

So trendy is Ritchie that his name amounts to a designer label. His work shows up in places such as Berlin, Paris and New York. Eugene, it is clear, has never quite been on his personal cultural map.

Nor has he been on ours. It's as amazing to have a large Matthew Ritchie work in downtown Eugene as it is to have a courthouse here designed by architect Thom Mayne. These are names that appear on the covers of glossy art magazines and in PBS specials.

So, who is Ritchie?

He's a boyish looking, utterly charming man in his early 40s who floats through life on a cloud of artspeak. When he came and talked to an auditorium full of students and art lovers at the University of Oregon in 2005, the room was rapt as he described his personal journey into artistic cosmology. "I am part science, part myth and part pulp fiction," the artist said.

For the last decade or so, Ritchie has been fascinated with the idea of information, infusing his fairly unremarkable drawing, painting and sculpture with long catalogs of arcane facts, some real and some imagined. His increasingly large scale work has been fluffed up with references to such fields as quantum physics, religion and biology.

In ``Proposition Player,'' a 2004 installation at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Ritchie dreamed up 49 separate characters in a world constructed around the notion of gambling. He has, with approval, been called a "world builder" by art critics.

What Ritchie has done in Eugene is more straightforward. On a third floor rooftop, in view of a glass-lined hallway that surrounds it on three sides, he has built a long, weblike metal structure that maps the Willamette River drainage. A few population centers are marked by circles or spheres.

The long, lacy structure floats above the roof on a series of metal rods, making it seem weightless, and protrudes at one point through the glass wall and onto a wooden bench.

And inside the hallway, facing the river map, is a set of three mural-sized backlit panels on which Ritchie has loosely sketched what might, or might not, be an Oregon landscape, and then annotated it with scrawled names and dates from the history of law.

The most interesting thing about the light boxes is that they each contain two different drawings, covered with lenticular plastic that allows the image to change completely as you walk past. Construction workers at the courthouse called it Cracker Jack art, after the small children's toys that use the same trick.

Good conceptual art makes you think about things. But Ritchie simply lays on the high concept like so much decoration. As conceptual art, the work is a failure.

``Stare Decisis,'' as he has pretentiously titled the mural, doesn't make me think. With its CliffsNotes approach to history, it doesn't illuminate anything about the law. It doesn't provoke curiosity, and it doesn't inspire creative connections. It doesn't grow out of anything the artist has experienced.

Rather, it sits there, as flat and lifeless as a term paper cribbed from Wikipedia. Strip out the legal names and dates and you could as meaningfully write in terms from church history, anatomy or accounting.

But if we take his work as conceptual art, that's because we've been listening too long to Ritchie, the art charlatan.

Ritchie would have us believe in an essential conceit of contemporary art, that somehow all this arranged information, lumped together, means more than the sum of its parts - if only you could be smart enough to understand the key.

Meaning here becomes a crutch, a way of gussying up work that doesn't otherwise have enough oomph.

Drop the conceptual nonsense, and Ritchie's courthouse work actually begins to succeed, if modestly. It may have little or nothing to do with legal history or the geography of Oregon, but the warm colors that emanate from the backlit panels of his timeline make a nice accent to the cool titanium skin of Mayne's powerful building. They give the courthouse a warm, beating heart inside its alien, synthetic skin.

While the centerpiece metal sculpture draws some small power from mapping the Willamette River system, its sprawling organic form does a better job at providing another complement to the courthouse itself. Ritchie's delicate metalwork could be moss or lichen, or perhaps some more ambitious life form, that has taken biological hold atop Mayne's sleek perfection.

(The real art to be enjoyed here, in fact, may be the courthouse itself - a vast and varied building of considerable subtlety and interest.)

Early after his selection, Ritchie said he would create a Web site to explain his work here more thoroughly. He didn't, and that's fine. The value of art, whatever the academics may say, is greater than any decoded meaning that could be posted on the Web.

In a lighter moment, Ritchie once compared his art to drinking a glass of beer. You can analyze the detailed biochemistry of beer, he said, and that could be interesting. Or you can just drink it and enjoy. Ritchie has given us a pretty good glass of beer, but it lacks much in the way of real chemistry.

OPEN HOUSE Public art at Eugene's new Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse What: Art by Matthew Ritchie, Sean Healy, Kris Timken and Cris Bruch Where: 405 E. Eighth Ave. Dedication: 10:30 a.m. Friday Open house: After Friday's dedication ceremony, which should last about an hour and 15 minutes, the building will be open for self-guided tours until 5 p.m. The building will also be open this Saturday from noon to 4 p.m. Visitors must bring government-issued photo ID to clear security.

LECTURE Thom Mayne What: The architect of the courthouse gives a talk When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday Where: The Shedd, 868 High St. Tickets: $10 to $25; $85 including pre-lecture dinner (434-7000)