I’ll admit straightaway that my take on Tim Burton’s show at MoMa is biased for two reasons. One was the crowd. I’ve been regularly attending the museum’s openings a couple years now, but have never seen the rank-and-file turn out like they did on Wednesday night. There were 20 times as many people as there were for say, Monet’s Water Lilies, and the long wait in a blue-lit corridor (which doubled as some hideous fiend’s esophagus) eventually lulled me into thinking I was waiting for something far more Space Mountain than museum exhibition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing -- I like Space Mountain -- but after all the jostling with strangers, I expected an exhilarating ride.

The second problem with I have with objectively evaluating this show is that I don’t love Tim Burton to begin with. I find his fuzzy goth schtick a little cloying and his themes too consistently juvenile. He’s an auteur, yes, but one who seems fundamentally trapped by his own (now rote-seeming) style. What I optimistically hoped to find in his art and ephemera were some new dimensions, perhaps the things Hollywood couldn’t brook: harder edges and/or failed experiments.

Not a chance. The only hard edges in this show belong to a life-sized model of Edward Scissorhands that looks straight out of a costume store in the village. The rest is a colorful but pointless expansion on Burton’s familiar menagerie of blubbery ghouls and goggle-eyed closet-monsters. There are many drawings and paintings, some short films and animation, and a handful of sculpy monsters that look a lot like comic store merchandise. Few will come away thinking anything new about the artist/filmmaker, though I imagine the show will nevertheless prove a success numbers-wise owing to the recognition factor of Burton’s brand. If you go, try to check out the Water Lilies afterward. I promise there won’t be a crowd.