My answer was that he was confusing buildings with artists. Art scenes are complex amalgams of strengths and weaknesses, but in large part they are a factor of artists producing work worthy of attention. I felt that San Francisco had been doing that job just fine for as long as I’d been around (since the mid-70s), and that that activity seemed to move right along without any meaningful impact from the edifices going up all over town. My point being that buildings take on meaning when we see what human impact they have and what is put in them. The attention that local artists get is what goes up and down, but the production is steady. Not to say that that steady production doesn’t have stronger moments than others.

More than a decade later, things have improved along these lines. SF MOMA is much more friendly to the region than in the past, not only as evidenced by the increasingly rigorous SECA awards but by the highly inclusive recent 75th anniversary events, and the ongoing education department engagement, such as this blog. Even the De Young now has a contemporary series that has shown such local stalwarts as John Bankston and Michael Arcega. Berkeley and Oakland have both been historically strong regional presenters. (I did my best at Yerba Buena to establish a tradition of primary commitment to support of local artists; what direction the current leadership takes remains to be seen.)

The notion of world class is the McGuffin in all this. I know world class is  just a phrase, but it’s one that sets my teeth on edge. It’s the kind of language choice I associate with celebrity gossip on television. Can’t you just see the folks interviewing the movie stars on the red carpet Sunday night at the Oscars pushing a microphone into Tom Cruise’s face and chirping, “Isn’t this just a world class event?” Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless. World class is a term that I believe leaked over from the sports world. In ranking how fast the fastest sprinters can cover 100 meters, it has objectivity and meaning. Slopped over to a realm such as the arts, it only pretends to some kind of verifiable truth. So while it feigns being about the best of the best, it really means, “talked about and caught up in the international hullaballoo that we all hear so much media talk about,” with a dash of “appreciated by we who are at top of the heap.” Both meanings reveal values that imply that our worth as people and arts professionals is determined by a competitive pecking order. Juxtapose this with the values of someone like local hero Ted Purves, who is an artist who worked for almost three years in his East Bay neighborhood through an organization he and his wife Susanne Cockrell started called Temescal Amity Works. Are their modest, yet deeply, profoundly moving community-based projects world class?

So, a long and long-winded way to say, we need and love gorgeous, progressive, thriving art presenters, the more the merrier. But let’s not equate these facilities with the health of our art scenes. These buildings are only one of a couple of dozen factors that make us all rich in our arts surroundings, which I’ve written about elsewhere.

I wanted to conclude by mentioning another miraculous art building’s upcoming arrival. I went on a tour of the new Crocker Museum in Sacramento on Thursday the 4th. It won’t be opening for several months but the building is essentially done, and it’s quite wonderful. It’s a one-hundred million dollar investment overseen by tireless director Lial Jones. In particular, there are several spectacular galleries on the third floor that will be the envy of most museum professionals. You can see the sawtooth clerestory-style skylights here:

Kathryn Bigelow

…on your first time to be used in the photography of  an Academy Award recipient for Best Picture and Direction:  Bay Area native Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Let’s hear it for small-gauge filmmaking!!  ¡Viva celluloide!

I used to pride myself on being really “with it,” going to shows, roaming the streets in an artistic manner and just generally being on the city’s creative pulse, rah rah rah. Ha! I know now that I am truly out of it because I have missed seeing these awesome stickers plastered in the Mission district along the same time as SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary shenanigans, but found them on one Steve Rhodes’ flickr site (thank you!). Someone had gotten their hands on a bunch of permanent collection labels and went ahead and added their own DIY sensibility to things. The collection, it seems, has grown to encompass a lot of municipal objects, along with a Judaica sensibility. Total LOL! Lurv it.

Anyone know the backstory? Or maybe some things are better left unattributed…

Kathryn Bigelow presented the Oscar for Best Director by Barbra Streisand at the 82nd Academy Awards

…0n the first of your graduates to take home Best Director and Picture Oscars.  The history of film instruction at SFAI includes the participation of such luminaries as Sidney Peterson, Stan Brakhage, Larry Jordan, and George Kuchar. Kathryn Bigelow continues SFAI’s currently challenged legacy of small-gauge celluloid filmmaking:  The Hurt Locker was photographed in Super 16mm.

Photo by Rebar

Certain bits of a museum are there for practicality and comfort – track lighting, plugs, elevators, thermostats, water fountains. Unlike the museum building or the work it houses, these niche spaces are designed to fade away into relative invisibility, to support the museum-going experience, and certainly aren’t meant to inspire or represent our cultural values. (Objectively one could read the presence of exit signs and wheelchair ramps as a culture’s endorsement of safety and accessibility, but that might be reading too much into things.)

On the other hand, our behavior is certainly, if subtly, shaped by these things we’ve been trained through repetition and exposure to ignore. No one stops in front of the unmarked door painted the same color as the wall in the corner of the gallery; one politely steps past it, and on to the next piece. A visual language composed of neutral paint and the most utilitarian of door knobs signals that this is not part of the show.

Photo by Rebar

If there’s one ubiquitous invisible fixture of the museum who invariably shapes behavior, it’s the museum guard. As fixtures, guards carry a host of responsibilities – they’re protectors, explainers, and wayfinders; their presence implies that artwork is worthy of protection, and we act accordingly.

Because they’re perceived as such a part of the institution, it’s not often that we give much thought to a guard’s experiences in the museum space, which must be unique, being both a part of the social code and exposed to it at the same time. So it’s exciting that a group of museum guards at the NY Met, many of whom are artists themselves, have decided to launch an art journal called Sw!pe, in which to showcase their own creative endeavors. According to 25CPW, the gallery where the launch party and opening was held on Thursday, “through this publication, the journal and its editors, hope to provide a platform and inspiration for other cultural institutions to showcase their own creative workforce.”

photo by Rebar

More than just talking about being museum guards, these artists are taking their position and leveraging it, processing it, activating a part of the museum infrastructure that simply wasn’t obvious before in a creative, engaging way. Out of the niche and into the spotlight.

While this intervention isn’t happening in the museum space itself, it has the potential to change the scripted social code of the museum nonetheless. Imagine engaging in a conversation with your helpful museum guard, not about the nearest bathroom or photography policies, but about their latest work or favorite masterpiece. It never really crossed our minds before, but now we wonder – why so invisible? When is the next employee show?

unattended. Photo by Scott DuBose

SFMOMA visitors have the best taste.  Just take a look at the color and variety of their umbrellas!  Thanks to Scott DuBose who caught the very well accessorized unattended umbrella rack on a rainy day.

We choose the Flickr pictures of the week from anything tagged “SFMOMA”. You tag too!

75 Reasons to Live green room. Photo by Suzanne Stein.

Kidding!  There were actually tons of events happening for SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary Weekend.  You can view the whole suite of photographs here.

75 Reasons to Live. Pamela Z, composer/sound artist on Robert Rauschenberg, Collection (formerly Untitled). Photo by James Williams

75 Reasons to Live: Stephen Hartman, psychoanalyst on Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled (Golden). Photo by Winni Wintermeyer

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Above, Pamela Z and Stephen Hartman giving their 7.5 minute talks as part of 75 Reasons to Live.  What,  your analyst doesn’t wear a wet suit?

Allison Smith: SMITHS. Photo by James Williams

This tin wall sconce is reflecting a huge American Fancy quilt—both part of Allison Smith’s installation.

SFMOMA’s 75th Anniversary Weekend Celebration: Evening Festivities. Photo by James Williams

More pictures at Flickr.

Recently having read Mani by Patrick Fermor, the genius British travel writer, I was impressed by his descriptions of clan warfare in the wild and isolated parts of Greece in the past. Families would build outrageously high towers, and in times of warfare, would rain down ruin on competing clans from their heights. Kind of a village version of the old (and less violent) competitions among Italian towns to have the most and biggest towers. Most notably surviving is San Gimignano, which once had 58 towers:

San Gimignano, Italy

With Yerba Buena and SFMOMA opening in the early 90s, and the remodelled Palace of the Legion of Honor opening shortly after that, San Francisco dominated the local museum edifice boom of almost 20 years ago. Then the opening of the new De Young a couple of years ago, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, not to mention the new Academy of Science, really brought a great sense of Gimignanismo to the City’s major museum world. The East Bay is now bracing for its own star turn, with the Oakland Museum’s new configuration this year, and the Berkeley Art Museum’s decision to remodel an existing building just off campus in the years to come.

Using a budget of some 58 million dollars, raised from bonds as well as private philanthropy, the museum has been closed since last year to remodel and rethink the way it fulfills its mission: documenting the art of California. The intention was in large part to update the tripartite art, nature, history structure of the museum to get more integration. With consultation by longtime designer Ted Cohen, who was the first exhibition designer at the museum, circa 1960-75,  who is working on color, design and placement of the works, the galleries have been expanded, including incorporating formerly outdoor spaces into the museum as new galleries, to great advantage.  The collection has been rehung, bringing much work never seen before by the public, as well as many new acquisitions. The crypt-like concrete walls of the art brut period have largely been replaced with brightly colored sheetrock walls. Vistas of the History galleries downstairs, that had been blocked for decades, are reopened. The strictly chronological displays have been replaced with the kind of thematic groupings that the Tate Modern in London initiated a decade ago. There are rooms for craft, for outsider art, Bay Area figurative abstraction, contemporary work, and much more. There are reading and media rooms. The stairway from the entrance to the galleries is now covered. Most striking of all are two new galleries that total 4500 square feet, especially the new gallery in the rear right that is a light-filled, terrazzo-floored gem for changing exhibitions. Pictured below is how (about half of the space) looked during initial install last month.

New Gallery Oakland Museum

A highlight of the upcoming opening celebration will be a 31-hour series of non-stop conversations between noted figures in the community (May 1 and 2). Upcoming in the first year after opening will be such exhibitions as a retrospective of the East Bay’s PIXAR studio, and major new work by noted artist and naturalist Mark Dion. I came away from my tour feeling that my neighborhood museum (I live in Jack London Square) had awoken from a long slumber and I very much looked forward to getting reacquainted.

We’d had a hectic day so only managed to push open the door somewhere around 4:45. Inside the Ping Pong we were welcomed by the director Joey Piziali, and the artist Deric Carner whose show we’d come to see. Carner is one of those artists Renny Pritikin talks about who has left San Francisco for the brighter lights of New York, but we knew him back when. He is the boyfriend of a fellow with whom I’ve been collaborating, the writer Bradford Nordeen. The show at Ping Pong is called, “None of the Above.”

Artist Deric Carner and one of the pictures in his current exhibition, “None of the Above,” at San Francisco's Ping Pong Gallery. Note: he's not leaning against anything, but actually standing that way.

I’m glad he flew in, because the work, while evocative and crisp, poses a lot of questions. The eternal dilemma: should an artwork capture you at first glance, or does reading the signage increase one’s appreciation and understanding of the thing one’s seeing? You can see by the photos that each individual piece in “None of the Above” gleams clean, bright and sunny as a travel poster, with something of the late Matisse “Jazz” minimalism to it, that Mediterranean invitingness. Invitationalism?  “Allure,” I guess.  Was it all made on the Riviera, like Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief? Intricately woven into the images, strange words and fragments can be read, but Carner explained that we were not think of the pictures as illustrations to the words, nor vice versa. The words aren’t captions either. “None of the above?” I asked. In fact, the work asks us to greet this new relation between text and image with a fresh perspective, almost a generosity of spirit, while keeping its cool and going easy on emotion, or sentiment.

That isn’t always easy, but at their best, I think, Deric Carner’s work does provide something genuinely original. One of the stronger pieces looks like an old fashioned doorknob floating on a sliver of teal, as the words “Build Your Own EXIT” float underneath it in a sharp-cut black. “You must be some kind of New Age guru,” I told Deric, who shook his head to laugh off the estimate. “Well, maybe, but a Deleuzian sort of guru,” he replied. That shut all of us up for a few seconds. Joey gave us each a copy of the catalog for the show with an essay by Chris Fitzpatrick on the work, which I took home, marveling at the ease with which Chris lets us know he doesn’t understand it all either. Carner’s mom and dad (and granddad) were all Berlitz translators, and he grew up in Paris and in Washington DC. There was something ironic about such a heritage, he mused, seeing that his current project is to destroy language.

We argued about whether language could be destroyed, but in that airy square room, on the far side of the hill, it certainly feels dislodged—like a tooth you’re wiggling with your tongue. Dodie and I sidled over to the price list that sat on the counter. My God are things reasonable there!