Taking Aesthetics Personally

What's so awful about San Francisco's new de Young Museum? The forbidding, forboding atmosphere. It feels unwelcoming, even antihuman. I sense a desire on the part of the museum's board and designers to intimidate, and to be on the cutting edge for the sake of the bragging rights, not because it serves the art or the general populace.

This unpleasantness begins before one even approaches the museum. The tower above it resembles nothing so much as an air traffic controller's post or a prison guard's loft. Draw near: you'll find that the skin of the museum resembles the corroding floor of a mechanic's garage. Enter the front courtyard and a fissure wends its way through the pavers and bisects a block of rock. At first I thought it was a flaw caused by improper settlement of the foundation; when I realized it was intentional I felt sad that the one bit of humor and interest chosen to enliven an otherwise deadly space was a nod to the cause of the demise of the old de Young—the crack looked like the fissures created by the Loma Prieta earthquake that rendered the former building dangerous and uninhabitable. My overall first impression is of a hard, barren fortress reminiscent of Azkaban prison or like the walls of Chateau D'If that confined Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo.

The walls of the courtyard are tall, dark and looming, folding inward in crushing, acute angles. The effect is claustrophobic and I found it brutal. Once inside the museum, the space is less oppressive, but some windows face out onto other tightly acutely angled walls. These block much of the light and any view, denying inmates, uh, visitors visual or emotional relief. A wall of windows at one end of the museum faces the sculpture garden, and these expanses of glass are tall and lovely. This gallery offers seating and affords pleasing views of a garden full of enjoyable and witty sculptures. However, one must disengage from the interior galleries in order to view the sculpture outside. The galleries in which paintings, drawings, photos and decorative items are hung or arranged provide mostly occluded views, if any.

I enjoyed a fine and well-curated exhibit of high fashion designed by many of the greatest 20th century couturiers for the late socialite Nan Kempner in a dark, windowless basement space. Such a gallery does serve delicate items like fabric and art on paper that could fade or weaken in bright light, but to have almost all the galleries above it turning inward and away from nature and sunshine seems ridiculous for a museum in the heart of Golden Gate Park, one of the most beautiful parks in the world, especially in a city so famously and frequently overcast and shrouded in fog, where any chance to enjoy natural light and far vistas of green is welcome.

The museum's art offerings are good for a regional museum; there are not as many world-class pieces as one would see in a top-tier U.S. art museum but the de Young offers a respectable survey of moderately important pieces. Its choice of architecture, however unfortunate I may find it, has set it apart from other museums and garnered a lot of attention from the art world. I admit that this gives the museum some cachet among the most powerful people in the art world, whether I feel it is merited or not.

The de Young's permanent collection of works by masters of the Hudson River School of American landscape painters has always pleased me. These romantic, often exotic landscapes are well displayed, as are the museum's fine historical furnishings. The de Young has always been a magnet for good traveling shows; they just finished an exhibition of assemblages by Louise Nevelson. She is my favorite large-format assemblage artist; her wall-sized constructions of black or white painted wooden shapes are crisp, tactile and bold. My favorite small-format assemblageur is Joseph Cornell, whose wonderful small boxes were also on display in San Francisco this past month across town at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I would love to have been back to SF MOMA and the de Young to enjoy both of these shows if I could. Each time I see one of Nevelson's or Cornell's pieces in person I'm captivated. Nevelson's pieces are strong, angular and imposing, just as she was. Cornell, on the other hand, was a master of filling small boxes with odd assortments of the sublime juxtaposed with the ridiculous. He fits whole worlds into tiny spaces. How delicious.

I will admit that the de Young's galleries are worth visiting and that the edifice is imposing and important, but I still find it not only uninviting and ugly but rather insulting. Why do I take its aesthetics so personally? Because I feel that it represents the insularity of the art world and the disrespect many art insiders have for the general public. Its aesthetic is, to my eye, aggressive and confrontational, just as so much modern art is. These are the very elements of the current art scene that so much of the public finds repellent and offensive; it makes them feel like they're being conned, used, even made fun of. Often they are. Of course there is a place in the world for aggressive, confrontational, even purposely ugly art, and I don't have to like it for it to merit appreciation and attention. But the desire to intrude and impose upon others with one's art, to make people squirm and squint and feel disconcerted has become so prevalent that the old values that were once synonymous with art—beauty, harmony, balance—are now looked down upon as pedestrian, unfashionable, retrograde. Both should coexist, and they do, but the current fashion is to find pieces and places that seek to please as minor, outdated and merely decorative. So much of modern art seeks to subvert what was for millennia the dominant paradigm. This is important and valuable, but it is not the only valid viewpoint and embracing this stance so completely alienates those who are not part of the in crowd.

Though often privately owned, museums are meant to be public spaces where people of all walks of life congregate and cogitate. They come to challenge themselves but also to feed a hunger for beauty, to admire others' technical skill and to relax and remove themselves from the everyday ugliness of the workaday world. Many museum-goers only visit museums when they are traveling; for millions of people museums are an expensive luxury that they rarely allow themselves. It can cost a family of four $60 to $80 to spend an hour or two at many major museums; they don't want to feel they've been used or taken advantage of, or that irony and subversion are the only values worth celebrating. Such spaces should be welcoming, comfortable, exciting spaces. Invigorate people with unusual design, sure, shake them up a bit, but give them some comfort and harmony as well. Don't make them feel belittled, bewildered and unimportant. Edginess can be enjoyable, but people are also drawn to curves, to human-scaled amenities and spaces, to color and light and the integration of architecture with its surroundings. There's no reason to deny museum-goers these delights for the sake of novelty.

The Denver Art Museum offers edgy interior and exterior spaces and breaks expected physical boundaries with jutting angular projections that spill into the plaza and air around its foundation. It sits boldly and assertively, daring people to approach. But it also offers whimsical sculptures along its periphery and many lovely views of the buildings around it which keep it from overwhelming its space or its visitors. It makes the most of its transparency, and though it is large the interior spaces are friendly, comfortable, reasonably sized and well integrated. Those with more traditional aesthetics will find many artworks and spaces in which to relax or be invigorated. Those whose idea of beauty is based more in finding pleasure in imbalance, in running a metaphorical finger along the bold leading edges of minimalism or in exploring the jagged and broken splatter of deconstruction can find pieces that satisfy their hungers, too, without denigrating those with other tastes. Why couldn't the de Young have moved in that direction?