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If anyone understands how to make something last — filmmaker Denis Villeneuve said at Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Art + Film Gala — it is the artist Vija Celmins. Villeneuve and Celmins were the guests of honor Saturday at the starry 15th annual event.

“In your work, you stop the seas and the stars long enough for us to truly see them,” Villeneuve said of Celmins during his speech inside a massive tent in LACMA’s backyard. “I have enormous respect for painters and sculptors, and I’ve always felt that cinema is seen as Pop Art. Film carries the burden of being popular in the present, but at the end of the day, the real challenge is to make something that can endure the test of time, like Vija does with her masterful work. So when a museum — a temple for artists — welcomes a filmmaker and puts a spotlight on cinema, it means a great deal for me.”

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1. Model and musician Soo Joo Park wore a feathered Gucci gown at the gala. (Gucci has been the event’s presenting sponsor since its inception in 2011.) (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) 2. Model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley just walked as a Victoria’s Secret Angel last month, after a 16-year hiatus. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) 3. Model Candice Swanepoel shows off the ethereal silver fringe details of her dress, also Gucci. Swanepoel also recently walked as an Angel in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in Culver City last month. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Celmins, 88, is known for her meticulous re-creations of natural imagery, like night skies, desert sands and ocean waves — and stars.

The night was certainly star-studded: Alex Consani, Andrew Garfield, Emily Ratajkowski, Javier Ambrossi, Javier Calvo, Kim Kardashian, Parker Posey, Salma Hayek Pinault, Sarah Paulson, Timothée Chalamet, Tyriq Withers and Viola Davis, among many others, traipsed among Chris Burden’s iconic “Urban Light” lamp posts. Other attendees included Al Pacino, Guitarricadelafuente, Anderson .Paak, Anthony Ramos, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ashley Park, Benito Skinner, Brittany Snow, Emma Watson, Gia Coppola, Jordan Firstman and Julia Garner.

Rosé was the night’s musical guest, performing the live debut of her single “New Trick” on a stage below the Geffen Galleries, Matisse’s “La Gerbe” visible through the windows above.

Rosé performed “New Trick,” “Number One Girl,” “APT” and a cover of the Killers’ “Read My Mind” at the 15th Annual LACMA Art + Film Gala, where she was the musical guest.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Just off the red carpet, Guitarricadelafuente — who made his feature film acting debut in the acclaimed “La Bola Negra” — spoke about the relationship between film and the arts.

“I just think everything is holding hands all the time,” he said. “I originally come from music, but when I make music, I’ve always come from a very visual place, and I think everything is so linked together. Like when I’m writing a song, just two words put in the right place can suddenly be a catalyst for a very powerful image in your mind.”

The Art + Film Gala was designed to knit the twin skeins of L.A.’s artistic and film communities closer together — and to raise money for the museum. This year it raised nearly $7 million (breaking last year’s record of $6.5 million) to support LACMA’s initiative to make film more central to its curatorial programming (as well as the museum’s broader mission). Previous honorees Barbara Kruger, Cathy Opie, Ed Ruscha and Helen Pashgian (it was her 92nd birthday) were also in attendance, as well as Lauren Halsey, Mark Bradford and Mary Corse, among many other artists.

Local elected officials and appointees present included U.S. Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and Rep. Laura Friedman, L.A. County Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Lindsey Horvath, L.A. Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky and L.A. County Chief Operating Officer Joe Nicchitta.

“It’s been an unforgettable year at LACMA,” said the museum’s director, Michael Govan, during his own speech. “Same tent, but everything around it — you’ve seen the little building we built, the David Geffen Galleries. It’s a new beginning for LACMA, honestly, and there’s so much more to come.”

LACMA director Michael Govan, left, and his wife Katherine Ross, a communications adviser and consultant, pose in front of Chris Burden’s “Urban Light.”

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Less than a week ago, the museum debuted a new piece of public art, Shio Kusaka’s “Beam,” a clay mosaic flying saucer supported by a yellow metal cone of light. Next weekend, Vanity Fair’s first “Screening Room” event series will christen LACMA’s Steve Tisch Theater. And coming soon, Diana Thater’s permanent video installation will be projected onto the bridge formed over Wilshire Boulevard by the new Peter Zumthor-designed building.

Co-chairs Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA trustee Eva Chow once again hosted the cocktail party and decadent dinner together, but Chow announced Saturday would mark her final year as co-chair. She estimated that during her tenure the gala has raised close to $60 million.

“To have started with an idea and to see it grow into one of Los Angeles’ most celebrated traditions has been one of [the] great privileges of my life,” Chow said. “I leave this chapter with tremendous pride, wonderful memories and above all gratitude. I hope this gala will continue to grow and inspire future generations, bringing together the worlds of art and film for many years to come.”

Chow first made her name as a fashion designer, and Art + Film’s red carpet (a walkway in front of the “Urban Light” lamp posts) is something of a fashion runway. Halsey sported the Wekafore hair salon longsleeve tee and transparent trousers over mesh camo shorts, and her longtime partner, Monique McWilliams, wore a sleek galaxy bodysuit. Architect Kulapat Yantrasast towered on clear plastic platform sandals, paired with a bright orange jumpsuit. Publicist and artist Sergio Farias wore a dripping ruby headpiece, sparkling silver suit and fluffy scarlet train.

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1. The contemporary artist Lauren Halsey, right, and her longterm partner Monique McWilliams pose together on the red carpet. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) 2. Architect Kulapat Yantrasast shows off platform sandals with his orange jumpsuit. He also wore a sparkling silver brooch that read: “Kulapat, Kulaparty, Kulapalace, Kulaparty, Kulapalazzo.” (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) 3. The singer, rapper, drummer and record producer Anderson .Paak poses with an ivory parasol, part of his outfit. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Celmins, ever practical, ever sly, wore an elevated, understated black velvet pantsuit. The writer Rachel Kushner introduced the artist onstage. “It is tempting to project romantic and cowboy notions of earth and sky and purity onto Vija Celmins, of artist as seer and monk,” Kushner said. “And even more romantically, Celmins is unimpressed by our need to fetishize and claim her. She might even heckle me for trying.”

A short film played, produced by LACMA’s Erin Wright, and took viewers inside Celmins’ New York studio. “Why did I let them in my studio?” Celmins quipped onstage. Then: “It’s a pleasure to be here. You guys are just crazy party people.”

Celmins fled with her family to Germany during the Soviet occupation of Latvia, then immigrated to Indiana. She later moved to L.A. to pursue her MFA at UCLA. “At one point, Los Angeles had a big influence on me,” Celmins said. “When I had never lived next to the ocean, and I had never seen the land. … I wanted to be an abstract painter, but it crept into my work. And so California had a really big influence on me.”

Nicole Kidman introduced Villeneuve, having flown 15 hours from Australia to do so despite never having formally met the “Dune” director. She cheekily referenced her viral AMC Theatres ad, saying she was inspired to make it in order to experience films from the likes of Villeneuve.

“His films explore the great mysteries of our existence: time, memory, identity, destiny, the things we cannot explain, and the possibility that there is something that we do not understand, that we will never understand,” Kidman said. “They are vast, they are mysterious, they are sometimes terrifying, but they are always profoundly human. And what I admire the most, perhaps, is that you have never allowed the scope of your ambition to overshadow the sensitivity of your humanity and your storytelling.”

Villeneuve recognized Celmins, Kidman and LACMA itself. He said one of the most powerful shots he has ever seen was of Kidman as Anna in Jonathan Glazer’s “Birth,” consumed by grief and haunted by surreal possibility. And he noted that LACMA’s James Turrell retrospective — particularly the experience of watching people stand in front of a brilliant, colorful light in silence and hope — showed him how to direct “Arrival.”

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1. Honoree Vija Celmins and her gallerist Matthew Marks pose together. “Painting is very fluid,” Celmins said in the video short LACMA made for the event. “You have to paint it, you have to make it stay where it wants to be, you have to beat it up and kill it and do all these things to make a painting say what you feel it should be doing.” (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times) 2. Anya Taylor-Joy — who stars as Alia Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s upcoming movie “Dune: Part 3” — poses with Villeneuve. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

“Museums have always been superfood for me,” Villeneuve said. “Every time I walk into one, I feel like a vampire. I’m sucking the energy from the walls, and one way or the other, it ends up in one of my films.”

He ended his speech with a joke that caused the room to erupt in laughter: “And to express my gratitude, with the blessing of my new friends at Amazon, I will reveal to you tonight… who will be the next James Bond,” Villeneuve said, and the room gasped. “The actor who will play the next James Bond is — and I will stop right now because Amy Pascal is about to have a heart attack.”

Tony Berlant, a seminal influence in the West Coast Pop Art movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

L.A. Louver, his longtime gallery, confirmed his death to The Times.

Berlant, a “painterly collage artist” who called Santa Monica his home for many decades, developed a signature style making collages using shards of printed tin instead of paper and thousands of shiny nails instead of glue. He often worked with vintage metal street signs and ads. In recent years, he printed personal photographs onto the metal, giving the colorful works story structure and an autobiographical bent.

One of his most recent shows, in fall 2018 at Hollywood’s Kohn Gallery, featured cut metal collages that blended elements of assemblage, Pop Art and abstraction. He was also known for his metal cube sculptures, which have been called quilt-like.

Berlant was a collector of both ancient Southwest pottery and Paleolithic stone objects. In fact, he co-curated two museum exhibitions: “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and “Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest” at LACMA. He was also a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, an archaeological conservancy that studies and preserves ancient Native American pottery.

Berlant was part of L.A.’s famous Ferus Gallery art scene in the 1960s, a group of “Cool School” artists that also included the late Ed Moses and Robert Irwin as well as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and others. The Ferus Gallery was a revolving door of experimentation at the time and helped fuse the city’s otherwise sprawling and disparate art scene.

Berlant was part of one of the earliest museum exhibitions of Pop Art in 1963, “Pop Art USA,” at the Oakland Art Museum. He showed his work alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.

The L.A. visual art scene may be more established today, but it’s also more commercial and safer in some ways. However Berlant firmly believed that L.A. still retains its defining creative spirit.

“My New York friends tend to think of the ’60s as a kind of golden moment that’s now been erased by commercial focus,” Berlant told The Times in 2018. “But I think L.A. is [still that]. It never left. I just assume that there’s all kinds of fantastic artists working that I’ve never heard of because they pop up here and there, and I see them, and I’m just really excited by that. It’s what makes you feel good about a place.”

Tony Berlant stands in front of his collaged-metal self portrait for his show “Fast Forward” at the Kohn Gallery in Hollywood in 2018.

(Patrick T. Fallon / For The Times)

Berlant’s work is included in the permanent collection of LACMA as well as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago.

He is survived by his wife, Helen Berlant; daughter, comedian Kate Berlant; and brother, Jeff Berlant.

The slogan of the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, which plays a prominent role in the new LACMA exhibition “Home of the Future, 1925–1985: Designing Domestic Utopias,” was blunt: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.”

Those words capture a central tension in the sprawling show, which occupies interconnected galleries at the far end of the museum’s Resnick Pavilion. Many of the beautiful, sometimes ingenious products and technologies developed with the rise of the modern era gripped the popular imagination and made life easier, healthier and more connected. But they didn’t free people from domestic labor or deliver the prosperity and security heralded by their promoters. They instead often raised expectations, forced dependency and gave rise to a vision of progress that reinforced social exclusion, bred anxieties about status, and concealed the environmental costs of a culture built on consumption.

Sound familiar?

The desire for these transformative products was never innate, and LACMA’s exhibition zeroes in on that idea from the start. “Good design is seldom accepted. It has to be sold,” Midcentury photographer Julius Shulman is quoted as saying in the catalog.

The show traces the hard sell of a domestic utopia via world’s fair posters, model home catalogs, magazine advertisements, television specials and science-fiction imagery — along with close to 200 physical objects of every sort, including kitchen appliances, electronics and furniture. In each of its four documented eras — pre- and post-Depression, post-World War II, the height of the Cold War, and the counterculture ’60s and ’70s — promoters dressed the same promise in new terms, whether through cleanliness, leisure, security or freedom.

Arthur Radebaugh, “Closer Than We Think! Robot Housemaid,” 1959.

(Chicago Tribune / TCA, photo courtesy San Francisco Academy of Comic Art Collection, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Ohio State University)

At every turn a vision of a better life was made to seem desirable and, just as important, inevitable. Like any good advertising, it worked best when soothing our anxieties and tapping into our fantasies.

In the 1920s and ’30s, new discoveries about hygiene inspired products by soaring talents in the nascent field of industrial design who set out to create clean, easily maintained homes — laboratories for healthy living in an age still ravaged by diseases like polio and tuberculosis. Mathias J. Weber and Russell E. Vanderhoff’s seductively streamlined Health-o-Meter scale gave the illusion that homeowners could be scientists, for the first time monitoring their own weight and growth. Kohler’s Integra, introduced as “the toilet of the future” at the Chicago fair, had a dramatic black finish made to equate sanitation with modern design. And Bruce Goff’s gleaming Vitrolite kitchen for Libbey-Owens-Ford glass company, shown in Charles Turzak’s rendering, integrated pigmented structural glass counters and cabinets into a polished, easily cleaned whole.

American Stove Co., Magic Chef stove, series 1400, introduced 1935.

(Lynton Gardiner / The Wolfsonian–Florida International University )

Vast expansions in electricity, telecommunications and production promised to connect the country and ease the tedious work of cooking, washing and cleaning. The American Stove Co.’s Magic Chef stove, one of the first ovens to be equipped with a clock, recast kitchen work as something that could be measured and controlled. Frank G. Brotz’s Kohler Electric Sink, which incorporated a motorized dishwasher into the familiar basin, promised release from the “thrice-daily drudgery” of washing dishes. Western Electric’s clear-cased Model 302 telephone enticed gawkers with an impressively complex system of wires and mechanisms.

George R. Lum for Western Electric Co., Telephone, model 302, desk set 1938.

(AT&T Archives and History Center)

Many of the names who dreamed up these wonders are now etched in design history. Isamu Noguchi created a baby monitor before baby monitors were a thing: the Radio Nurse, a dark Bakelite receiver resembling an abstract face. Walter Dorwin Teague gave corporate products a precise, machine-age polish, while Raymond Loewy brought the same sleek optimism to objects like the globe-shaped New World radio for Colonial Radio Corp., molded in glossy, heat-resistant Catalin and embodying quite literally the new reach of communications.

Lester Beall’s Rural Electrification Administration poster.

(The Resnick Collection)

Selling this promise of a technological future to those clinging to the dream of American prosperity was an especially potent exercise during the Depression. In his illustrated 1932 manifesto “Horizons,” Norman Bel Geddes cast “new design” as a path toward “economy, efficiency, comfort and happiness.” As the economy faltered, an orderly, healthy home could be sold as a form of salvation, with prosperity seemingly within reach. At the Chicago fair, corporations sponsored full-scale model homes and filled them with products already available or soon to be. For rural households still without electricity, Lester Beall’s 1937 Rural Electrification Administration poster “Wash Day” turns federal infrastructure into a household fantasy. Inside the black silhouette of a farmhouse, a pristine white washing machine appears at an almost monumental scale, set against flat fields of saturated color.

Irving Harper of George Nelson and Co. for Herman Miller Inc., Marshmallow Love Seat, model 5670, designed 1956, this example made c. 1960s.

(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)

By the ‘40s and ‘50s, the postwar home and its many accouterments — powered by wartime advancements, growing abundance and an ethos of “buy now, pay later” — amplified the promise. Plastic, prefabrication and push-button convenience suggested that mass production could bring elegant, futuristic living — and freedom from drudgery — within reach of the masses. George Nelson treated furniture as a flexible system, producing (with designer Irving Harper) the candy-colored Marshmallow Love Seat; replacing conventional upholstery with 18 brightly colored circular cushions mounted on a spare steel frame. Eero Saarinen produced the molded-fiberglass Pedestal chair, sweeping the seat and stem into a single sculptural form intended to eliminate what he called the “slum of legs” beneath tables and chairs.

Eero Aarnio for Asko Oy, Ball Chair, designed 1963.

(Jonathan Urban / Museum Associates / LACMA)

Architects attempted to make the home itself into a sexy product. At Disneyland, Monsanto’s House of the Future, designed by architects Richard Hamilton and Marvin Goody, was a gleaming, cross-shaped structure of molded plastic, raised above the ground on cantilevered supports and partnered (in renderings) with a plastic heliport. Its kitchen featured molded surfaces and electric appliances. Promotional images and films conjured a playful, adaptable and benevolent house — plastic as the building block of family happiness.

Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion house was an aluminum, factory-made “dwelling machine” that could be delivered by air and assembled almost anywhere. Its unified form, modular furnishings, water-recycling system and labor-saving technology promised a more efficient life, less tied to conventional building and household routines.

Hamilton & Goody Architects, Monsanto House of the Future, 1956.

(MIT Museum)

Institutions like the Museum of Modern Art and magazines like Arts & Architecture promoted prototype homes from now legendary industrial designers and modernist architects like Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, Marcel Breuer, Albert Frey, Gregory Ain and even Frank Lloyd Wright.

Effective pitches could turn a product, whatever size, into a fantasy of freedom. In the General Motors film “Design for Dreaming” (1956), directed by William Beaudine, a woman enters a fabulous kitchen as if in a magical dream. The promise, said curator Wendy Kaplan, was that the fictional woman would have more time for “tennis and hanging with … friends.” The dream even hinted at a life beyond domesticity — perhaps even freedom to “actually have a profession,” Kaplan added.

But the housewife in these displays was still expected to remain responsible for the home. Liberation came through a more efficient kitchen, not a change in who cooked. And appliances that reduced some labor often raised the bar: more frequent washing, more cleaning, more elaborate meals, as University of Chicago home economics professor Hazel Kyrk described in “Economic Problems of the Family.”

Frank G. Brotz for Kohler Co., Electric Sink, introduced 1926, this example 1928, Kohler Co.

(Kohler Archives)

That universal “everyone” did not, however, include everyone. Government-backed home ownership and the suburban boom excluded many Black, Latino and Asian Americans through redlining, restrictive covenants and discriminatory lending — a fact reflected in the almost complete absence of minorities in these vast selling campaigns.

A few welcome exceptions on the creators’ side are architect Paul R. Williams’ “Small Home of Tomorrow,” which proposed a simple, well-designed home fitted with gee-whiz appliances; Arthur Elrod and William C. Raiser’s swirling, vivid orange Ebony test kitchen, which treated cooking as creative craft; and the proposed multiracial community of Soul City, founded by Floyd McKissick, which imagined homeownership as a claim to economic autonomy that segregation denied.

The vision of a utopian domestic future took a strange turn during the Cold War, marrying the breathless excitement of the space age with the existential dread of nuclear annihilation. The same scientific power that had transformed lives now produced weapons capable of destroying humanity. The home was imagined as both shelter and command center.

Office of Donald Deskey Associates. Drawing, design for Undersea Lounge: Scheme 3 Interior Perspective, ca. 1960s. Designed by Russell Heston (b. 1929).

(The Estate of Donald Deskey, courtesy Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Art Resource, NY)

As the age’s potent mix of terror and delirium spun on, designers and illustrators proposed ways to live comfortably in space, underwater or in underground bunkers. Paul László’s “Atomville, U.S.A.,” a vision of suburbia half a century in the future, buried the family home beneath an earthen shell that doubled as a helicopter landing pad. Its sunken gardens and swimming pool promised comfort, while a blast door, escape hatches and air filtration protected against nuclear fallout. Donald Deskey Associates imagined a hypnotic “Undersea Lounge,” a self-contained interior for living beneath the water, while NASA illustrator Rick Guidice vividly depicted physicist Gerard K. O’Neill’s proposed Stanford Torus — an enormous, wheel-shaped suburb in space.

Bob Lerner for LOOK Magazine, Anne Anderson in RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen, 1959, kitchen designed 1956.

(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOOK Magazine, Photograph Collection / Robert S. Lerner Photography, LLC)

An endless array of products leaned into the public’s awe at the age’s sci-fi possibilities. This included prescient pieces ahead of their time, like the video-enabled AT&T Picturephone, and those that would never come to pass, such as the RCA Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen. The latter’s spread in Look Magazine (displayed for crowds at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow) showcases a Roomba-like vacuum and other astonishing appliances that seem to work by themselves. But men hidden behind two-way mirrors actually operated them. Others, like the two-wheeled Ford Gyron Remote Control Car of the Future, only managed to come to life as children’s toys; and some were just plain ridiculous, like Honeywell’s H316 Kitchen Computer, which required a two-week training course just to retrieve a recipe.

Honeywell Inc.; Computer Control Division; Neiman Marcus, H316 Kitchen Computer, 1969.

(Mark Richards / the Computer History Museum)

By the late 1960s, confidence in technological progress was fraying. Environmental damage, plastic waste and the conformity of suburbia prompted designers and countercultural communities to imagine other ways of living — up to a point. The residents of Drop City, a Colorado artists’ community, built domes from the curved steel tops of salvaged cars. Architects Barry Simpson and Charles Hosford made a folding stool that could serve as a seat, stepstool or side table. Small, portable, multipurpose designs, from inflatables to cardboard furniture offered a life with fewer possessions. The Whole Earth Catalog, founded by writer and editor Stewart Brand, promoted ecological knowledge and self-sufficiency, but was still a compendium of things to buy.

Companies, too, found ways to sell all natural products, flexibility and individual expression. Zanotta advertised the first beanbag chair, the polystyrene-filled “Sacco,” as “A Big Bag, a Soft Seat.” Its formless body accommodated slouching, lounging or lying down, selling freedom from both conventional posture and the bourgeois living room. Even resistance to consumerism could be packaged as a new consumer ideal.

The pairing of objects with their promotional campaigns is the show’s most illuminating contribution, shedding light on the massive, often strange apparatus needed to drive these incredible designs — some icons, some welcome surprises — forward in each age. It reveals how the country’s 20th century manufacturing prowess expanded into the production of dreams. Corporations, government and the media taught consumers what progress should look like, which anxieties a product might soothe, and what kind of future to desire.

Isamu Noguchi; Zenith Radio Corporation, Radio Nurse receiver and Guardian Ear transmitter with original box, 1937.

( Museum Associates / LACMA)

But the sheer abundance of objects — I haven’t even mentioned the fascinating companion show-within-the-show, “The Kitchen and Its Discontents” — leaves less room for examining those campaigns and the work they performed. The excellent catalog follows those connections further, tracing how often hypnotic visions of the future home both reflected and shaped ideas about lifestyle, progress, gender, race, labor and consumption; in the galleries, those ideas remain largely suggestive.

Still, the exhibition offers a revelatory history — and a telling roadmap to our present. While the future imagined here made life easier, cleaner, more beautiful and more exciting, it did not arrive as advertised. The plastic home didn’t remake housing; the automated kitchen didn’t free women from domestic work; the self-sufficient home gave way to new forms of reliance. Yet a similar techno-utopian pitch survives in today’s smart homes and domestic technologies, from assistants like Alexa to artificial intelligence marketed as a way to make life easier. These tools may offer real benefits even as they addict and distract us. And while the systems sustaining our comfortable, consumption-driven lives launch us toward climate disaster.

These rooms powerfully evoke what Kaplan in the catalog calls America’s “restless forward motion, powered by the conviction that tomorrow’s design would solve today’s problems.” That ingenuity is worth celebrating. But its promises deserve open-eyed scrutiny.