A serious museum

Kenneth Baker delivered a balanced though slippery non-story about developments at the DeYoung Museum in the Chronicle yesterday. What it comes down to is that people are complaining about an apparent softening of content in exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums, in spite of three very substantial shows either on now (Hiroshi Sugimoto at the DeYoung and a huge exhibition of works on paper from the Achenbach at the Legion of Honor) or coming soon (Louise Nevelson). The substantial shows have been counterweighted by a series of fashion and decorative art exhibitions, as well as a coming exhibition of glasswork by Dale Chihuly. I have to say that I don't think the criticism is very substantial, but it's a glass half full situation -- all a matter of how one interprets things through the prism of public relations. I really do think the Sugimoto show is one of the best presentations of contemporary art to have happened at the DeYoung, and in fact I think it holds its own against shows at SFMOMA because of the respect given to the Sugimoto's decisions about how to present his work. As a docent I've never seen audiences so engaged with contemporary work at the DeYoung, and it's been a great pleasure to tour the show with people willing to take time to respond to the work as well as ask questions and discuss their own responses to it. I don't remember any comparable exhibition being put on during the tenure of Harry Parker, so I give the new director the credit for bringing Sugimoto here and not doing it in a cursory way (i.e., re-hanging based on the previous venues).

As for the fashion shows, and likewise the decorative arts and craft art shows, I tend not to go through them myself (another example Baker could have highlighted was the exhibition of French jewelry recently at the Legion) even though in the back of my mind I think that as someone who wants to be an artist I should be looking at them as source material just as I do anything else that's in my world. But these shows are great favorites with my fellow docents, because of their personal tastes and also because they tend to be experiences that can be nicely augmented with information that can be communicated during a tour. I guess Monet in Normandy, the great "real art" crowd-pleaser of recent years at the Legion of Honor, was a more substantial program than the fashion shows -- but really, on the ground it all comes down to pleasure.