Travelling Bowie exhibition captures singer's evolution of persona's and sounds but overdoes the art angle

You've probably already heard about David Bowie's cocaine spoon. It's one of hundreds of artefacts from the rock star's career that help make up the open-armed, headphone-insistent, steadily applauding show, "David Bowie Is", newly mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) for its only US stop.

The spoon sits, without fanfare, in a case alongside Bowie's sketches and journal entries, and below the cover art for his 1974 album Diamond Dogs, a portrait of the artist as a partial canine.

And it's shocking enough - this piece of narcotics paraphernalia presented as one more relic of a life in rock, just like the early guitar or the handwritten lyrics to songs that have become classics - that it's difficult to visit the show and not talk about it.

Yes, the spoon may symbolise Bowie's mid-1970s period of addiction to coke, a situation he mythologised with another in his series of personas, the Thin White Duke from the time of his Station to Station album. But it is not a fitting symbol for the show as a whole.

"David Bowie Is" happens to be a lot of things, most of them very good: testament to the dogged effort that underlies most successful self-invention; compelling argument for the man's musical greatness; visit to funky grandpa's vintage high-end thrift store; nostalgia trip for teenagers of the 1960s and '70s; foundational material for the selfie era; the hippest lost episode of Hoarders you could ever imagine; and pretty good rock'n'roll experience, thanks to liberal doses of Bowie music beamed in through the headphones that are issued upon entrance.

But it is not nearly as tough-minded about Bowie as the coke spoon would suggest.