From February 20 to March 28, 2026, at the Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York, the artist Claudia Bitrán presented her exhibition Titanic, A Deep Emotion. The occasion marked the première of Bitrán’s remake of James Cameron’s iconic 1997 film: a global cinematic phenomenon that redefined the concept of the blockbuster at the close of the 20th century. However, unlike Cameron’s movie, which commanded the highest budget in Hollywood up to that time, Bitrán herself crafted her own version employing a deliberately imperfect DIY aesthetic. Her work offers a sharp critique of mass culture at the precise historical moment when our contemporary society celebrates individualism more than ever before, amid the simultaneous rise of heteronormative fascisms and of content culture throughout the entire world.
Prestigious grants and residencies, including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023, supported Bitrán as she began reconstructing her feature film more than a decade ago, during her 2014 residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Weaving together different media, including cinema, painting, sculpture, drawing, animation, and performance, Titanic, A Deep Emotion operates as a transmedial collage that the artist both directed and stars in, drawing in more than 1,400 participants and dozens of locations across the United States, Chile, and Mexico. True, the artist herself mounted a colossal effort, much like Cameron, yet each creator worked within completely distinct aesthetic registers. While Cameron’s film achieved massive popular success across the globe, Bitrán’s version reminds us that art, too, can actively expand its audiences toward the masses, directly challenging the traditional, deeply bourgeois divides between art and spectacle. Indeed, during one of New York’s most bitterly cold winters, eager visitors formed a line that stretched several city blocks outside the gallery on its opening day. Cameron’s blockbuster actively packed theaters across the world through its powerful narrative –the romance between Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet)– and through the hit song “My Heart Will Go On,” which Céline Dion herself performed, while Bitrán’s version packed a gallery in the middle of a snow-covered city, within a difficult context that mainstream critics have already identified as the collapse of art. However, as Bitrán’s own work invites us to carefully consider, art has certainly not ended. Quite the opposite.
