Dyed in the Wool

I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat since I was just a tyke. I remember jumping on my friend Tracy’s bed and shouting “Humphrey! Humphrey!” with her repeatedly on a hot August night during the 1968 Democratic convention when Hubert Humphrey became the nominee after front-runner Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June. Our parents were crowded around a 12-inch black-and-white TV in the living room with a bunch of other adults watching the convention. I was only five, but my friends and I were already aware that Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated that year, that there were riots breaking out in major cities, and that the world felt like a dangerous place where people, presidents, cities and whole countries were on the edge of death or madness much of the time.

We lived in a safe little suburb but were only 45 minutes from places like Berkeley and San Francisco, where Governor Ronald Reagan was gassing students for speaking freely on college campuses. Black Panthers based in Oakland were shouting about black power issues on the TV news, Mario Savio led the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, and issues of race, class, gender equality and other hot-button issues were discussed all the time on TV, radio, in magazines, even at Tupperware parties. Most of my friends were also the children of educators, so we were raised in little progressive intellectual greenhouses. We’d be dragged to parties where our parents would drink sangria and smoke a lot of cigarettes. (There were cigarette burns on almost everybody’s coffee tables when I was a child, made when a filter-tipped True or Pall-Mall or Salem cigarette burned down too far or got knocked aside and left a charred black oval that would later be covered by a bowl of mixed nuts.)

Our parents would discuss gender politics and racism too loudly, somebody’d get too earnest and two dads would go out on the patio to talk alone for a while as they hashed out the finer points of foreign policy. Then somebody would put on Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and we’d all dance. We kids would all stay up too late, eat too many Bugles or Fritos or Beer Nuts, sneak peeks at some dad’s stash of Playboy magazines in the master bedroom, and then eventually we’d pass out on beds and sofas and be dragged home by our parents in the wee hours after the parties died down.

By 1968 the country had been at war in Vietnam my whole short life, and the students my young mother taught in her high school English classes were graduating, some going straight to Southeast Asia. Worry about the war was on everyone’s mind, on posters, cars bumpers and sung about on the radio regularly. In retrospect many people may think the time only seems as if it was especially politicized because of all that’s been made of it in movies and books since then. But even to me, a child on the verge of kindergarten, life really was politicized; even as little children were aware of big political issues. All my little friends and I hated President Nixon just as much as our parents did. We were inculcated with political beliefs that had been passed down from parents who threatened disinheritance (perhaps seriously) if we considered straying from the Democratic party line.

So the Democratic Party is in my blood. I get disgusted with elements of the party’s politics at times, of course, because of the way it gets bogged down, bloated and politicians get bought by special interests. But I believe in the core values of my party as I see them, not just because I grew up being told they were right, but because, time and time again, I’ve watched the core values of the Republican Party damage the fabric of our nation and the people in it. The core values of my party have echoed the values that I was taught to cherish when I was at my grandmother’s knee. Things like respecting and fostering diversity. Showing mercy to those in need. Valuing diplomacy over unnecessary force. Fighting for others’ rights to express themselves in ways that I don’t necessarily personally agree with. Remembering that we’re part of a world community and wanting everyone to do better, not just ourselves and our friends. Being willing to sacrifice a little personal comfort for the benefit of the greater good. Of course, these are not solely Democratic values, but I believe the Democratic Party has done a better job of emphasizing and exalting these values, while the Republican Party has done a great deal to undercut them.

I have some dear Republican friends with whom I get along well because we stick to issues that we agree on, for the most part. When I make new Republican friends they are often surprised to learn that Democrats can have strong family values and attach huge importance to self-reliance, discipline, honesty, integrity and honor, too, just as their families do. Somehow millions of Republicans have been led to believe that those are conservative traits that accrue only to Republicans, and that Democrats are necessarily permissive, careless, amoral at best and immoral at worst, and disrespectful of private property and personal boundaries. Partly, this is because easily offended ultraconservatives who don’t approve of people who engage in activities they don’t personally enjoy will often note one example of iffy behavior by a Democrat and tar all progressives with the same brush. There’s no way to have thoughtful, fact-based, rational dialog with people who jump from one logical fallacy to another and refuse to look at facts.

But not all Republicans or independent voters are like that, and we Democrats have to be honest and respectful, too. It’s easy for us to paint all Republicans with labels like selfish, militaristic, judgmental or unforgiving. We Democrats believe that because Republicans vote for a party with, yes, a selfish, militaristic, judgmental and unforgiving party platform, they must believe in all the tenets of that platform. But they may just be afraid of being taxed beyond their ability to stay in their homes or to save enough to pay off their credit card bills. They may believe that waging big wars is the only way to save their grandkids from being blown up by religious zealots. I disagree with them, but they’re sincere and many of them do want the best for the greatest number. I think they’re seriously misguided, but they don’t have to be monsters just because they’re not Democrats.

In my twenties I spent a great deal of time with young, almost exclusively male, members of the Libertarian party. Most of them had Stanford graduate degrees, which they believed proved that they were intellectually superior in every way and that their political beliefs must therefore be perfectly and unassailably logical. (They did not understand that getting perfect SAT math scores does not guarantee that one is wise, logical or insightful.) I had hundreds of debates with them on the limits of a totally free-market-based government to ensure a clean environment, build safe roads and neighborhoods, redress grievances or oversee product purity, among a million other things. They couldn’t bend me to their beliefs, and I couldn’t be swayed to theirs. But I learned about a different way of thinking and saw how even very smart people can fall prey to logical fallacies based on emotional factors (even if they swear to Ayn Rand that that they’re above all that). It was great mental training to argue the permutations of their belief system, and I learned how to get them to listen to me more carefully by proving to them that I would listen to and understand their ideas, even if I did not agree with them. And that’s a start. I believe in respectful discourse; one must listen closely to the opposition and be polite enough to get them to let down their hair and speak honestly to glean enough information to counter their arguments effectively. Sun Tzu was right: know thy enemy.

What I find saddest is political infighting among people who are of the same party and who share about 95% of their beliefs, but who backbite, attack and take each other down based on the remaining 5%. I am so frustrated with my party now when people like James Carville publicly attack someone like Bill Richardson and call him Judas for having the timerity to stand up for the candidate he believes is best for the country (in this case Barack Obama) rather than pledging himself blindly to someone whom he feels cannot win the election or serve the country quite as well (in this case Hillary Clinton). Carville believes Richardson’s guilt at feeling politically beholden to Hillary’s husband should trump Richardson’s doing what he believes to be the right thing for the nation. Disgusting. The mud-slinging, name-calling and low-blows being delivered during this campaign have sickened us all. The saddest part is that it divides the party, alienates those who are independent or undecided, and weakens us in the eyes of those who will vote in the November election.

We shoot ourselves in the foot when we engage in public intraparty backbiting. And then we end up with people who say, “I’ve been a Democrat all my life, but I’m so angry at [the candidate other than my own] that if that nasty [other Democratic candidate] is nominated, I’m not going to vote at all. Or I’ll just go and vote for McCain!” I’ve heard Hillary supporters say if people aren’t smart enough to line up behind their woman, they’ll be too disgusted by the nearsighted sexists all around them to vote for Barack. Yeah, letting the party that represents everything they say they’re fighting against win—that’ll show ’em! And I’ve heard even more people say that they think Hillary is so much in the thrall of behind-the-scenes power brokers and special interests and has moved so far to the middle and done so much damage to her party’s image, she’s essentially a Republican now, so voting for a straightforward Republican would be better than voting for a stealth Republican like her.

Wait a minute!

I totally understand disgust and anger with the current situation. I wonder at times whether Hillary and Bill are engaging in some sort of horrible political murder-suicide pact, seemingly trying to destroy the Democratic party and the country (and their own historical reputations, ultimately) by dividing the country and damaging the one hope the country has to save ourselves from slipping further into the cesspool W has dragged us into. Several journos even suggest that Hillary, knowing she can’t win the nomination, is trying to taint Barack so completely that McCain will win—and then people will be so horrified after four years under him that they’ll be thrilled to give her another shot in 2012. I think this is a wacko conspiracy theory, but so many wacko behind-the-scenes political maneuverings have been uncovered in the past decade that I’m loath to dismiss anything as impossible now.

But listen—

A Democrat who refuses to vote is, to my mind, essentially voting for McCain. Remember the Latin maxim: “Qui tacet consentire videtur.” He who is silent is assumed to give his consent. If you refuse to provide a vote for the alternative out of a devotion to lofty principles over pragmatism, you aid the other side. Unless Democrats lift our voices against Republican candidates, we give them our tacit consent, and that’s the message we send to the whole world, not just to the 5% of the world’s population that happens to live in the U.S. If we can’t be bothered to exercise the right to vote that people died to secure for us, and which people around the world are willing to die for even today, we’re lazy and careless and deserve what we get.

I find much distasteful about Hillary’s recent behavior, and her chance of securing the nomination is now minuscule. However, because Democrats are now so polarized we risk having a significant number of her supporters simply bow out of further political participation out of petulance. I hope that they will consider this: there are a huge number of reasons why either Obama or Clinton would be infinitely better for the nation (and the world beyond our borders) than McCain. Here’s the number one reason:

McCain would appoint conservatives to the Supreme Court who would continue the wholesale attacks on civil liberties and the general war on good sense that we’ve seen under Bush. That would be a tragedy.

McCain has made it increasingly clear during this campaign that, overused and misleading “maverick” label aside (he’s one of the biggest insiders there is and he toes the conservative line—he’s no maverick), he is nothing if not a conservative Republican. He would appoint people who would continue to undercut our civil rights in dozens of ways, as the court has done under Bush. Corporate America would get a free pass to continue environmentally disastrous behavior, like opening more pristine areas to drilling, removing protection from threatened species and dragging behind in setting guidelines for slowing global warming. Conservative judges will continue to narrowly interpret the constitution to support big businesses and intrusive government that puts ruthless administrative expediency before your rights. (Recount legitimate votes? Naw, toss them out and anoint the man with half-a-million fewer votes! Miranda rights? Who needs them! Habeus corpus laws? They don’t apply when the administration doesn’t want them to. And on and on.) Reproductive rights could keep being diminished until even more people end up having back-alley abortions, since legal ones and RU-486 could become so hard to secure. (In hundreds of counties across the U.S., access to legal, first-trimester abortion is already hard or impossible to obtain, even for adult women with ready money, under the current administration.)

McCain says he would leave the troops in Iraq. He thinks watching millions of people lose their homes to foreclosure and glutting the market with homes that nobody takes care of that are sold as-is at auction makes more sense than urging the companies that got rich on their irresponsible mortgage lending decisions to find ways to help irresponsible mortgagees restructure debt and help keep the housing market afloat. (A misguided desire not to show mercy to people who’ve made mistakes may seem more “fair,” but helping them find ways to keep their homes means saving the industry from free-fall and helping the housing market keep more of its value, which benefits us all.) McCain would continue our belligerent foreign policy, making sure our name continues to be mud around the world, making us more prone to terrorist attacks and harming us economically as well by showing indifference to other cultures and using force instead of diplomacy. Hillary voted for funding for the current war, but she knows now what a disaster it was; McCain still supports it.

I believe that Hillary Clinton would be less progressive, less diplomatic and less proactive on the subjects I just listed than Barack Obama, so I support his candidacy over hers. But she and Obama agree on most of the important things. Their health care plans are very similar, they agree in their opposition to continuing the war in Iraq, to stopping the mess in Guantanamo, to ending the violations of habeus corpus and stopping the disregard of the Geneva Conventions. Many of their economic plans are similar, too. Their ways of expressing themselves differ vastly, of course, enough so that I think it would make a great difference in their ability to get the country to go along with them and to get the rest of the world behind us. So yes, it matters to me a lot that Obama be our nominee and win. But with all her faults, Hillary would be a much better choice for our country than McCain, the hypocrite, who’s all big talk about not being in lobbyists’ pockets while being in their debt, who voted to continue waterboarding (so much for all his fancy words about it being torture a few months back), and is famous for his nasty temper and bullying manner.

There are myriad reasons why I feel we would all be better off under a Democrat than a Republican, but the number one reason to vote for Democrats is because of the decades of horrible influence that Republican presidents would have on the future of the country because of their power to nominate Supreme Court justices. We have several justices on the brink of retirement right now; the next president could have as many as three new seats to fill, since Justice Breyer, an introvert who hates living in Washington, is aching to retire and leave D.C.; Justice Ginsberg (my heroine!) is almost 75, has had colon cancer and is rather frail; and Justice John Paul Stevens turns 88 this month.

Right now we often have a 5-4 conservative majority of the court, but swing votes sometimes save us from the worst decisions, and the strong voices of reason on the moderate left still on the court at least make important arguments that become part of the record that is reviewed when these issues come back before the court later. Their dissenting decisions are influential, if not now, then later. If the conservative majority becomes lopsided, they not only get their way on every decision, and choose to decide more dangerous cases because they know they’ll get away with whatever they want; they can also quash dissenting opinion and the open airing of other points of view. They fill seats with people who may serve 20 or 30 years and damage the fabric of our lives and our Constitution for a generation.

Please, fellow and sister Democrats, don’t even THINK of staying home when a Republican has a chance to put another civil rights-hating conservative on the bench.

What Do Shimmering Winks Look Like?

I've been quite busy in my studio this year, and have already completed a number of new paintings and assemblages. Several of them are available for viewing via lauragrey.com. To see what comes of messing with antique clock and watch parts, shimmering glass stones, metal mesh and sheer acrylic paints, just scroll to the bottom of the Assemblages page and click on the photo of my artwork. Then you'll see my online gallery showing over 60 of my paintings and assemblages, including a few inspired by tiddlywinks. (Yes, really. Can pick-up sticks be far behind?) About a dozen of my drawings are also available online; just go to the Drawings page at lauragrey.com. I update the gallery frequently; more pieces will be coming soon!

Stendhal Syndrome

When Stendhal, the 19th century French author, visited Florence in 1817 he became so overwhelmed by the city's glorious art that, overcome by a surfeit of visual splendor, he had a temporary psychological breakdown. He's not the only one to react to extreme beauty in this way. Art lovers have found being in the presence of tremendous beauty so moving and emotionally taxing that they've suffered confusion, tachycardia, dizziness and hallucinations in art museums frequently enough for psychiatrists to give a name to this cluster of responses: Stendhal Syndrome.

Tourists occasionally experience breakdowns while overcome by the beauty of Botticelli's paintings in the Galleria degli Uffizi or at the foot of Michelangelo's David at the Galleria dell'Accademia. Some are sent to Florence's Santa Maria Nuova Hospital's psychiatric ward for evaluation. The syndrome was named in 1979 after an Italian psychiatrist observed more than 100 cases among tourists in Florence. Apparently American tourists are not known to suffer the syndrome as Europeans do; some say that perhaps this is because as a culture, we don't experience the same immersion and attachment to masterworks of art as Europeans. As a rule, Europeans believe we derive neither the ecstatic joy in being surrounded by profoundly beautiful and important masterworks, nor the psychological trauma of being overwhelmed by it. When they find an American who is deeply touched by their heritage and art, most Europeans are surprised and delighted. I have found that many will go out of their way to help a visitor enjoy immersion in their glory.

Most U.S. tourists visiting Europe simply lack the frame of reference and familiarity with European art and history that Europeans have, and without such a frame of reference there is less build up of anticipation or depth of understanding, and these are the underpinnings of emotional reaction. Faced with the exhaustion of travel, the unforgiving pace and the breadth of new experiences that most packaged tours provide to Americans overseas, the majority of my compatriots can be forgiven for being too numbed and overwhelmed by the fatigue and novelty of European tourism for great meaning to sink in. It's not that emotional reactions to beauty and meaning are lacking in our makeup, but that most of us have simply not been exposed to either the depth or breadth of art historical experience and understanding that many Europeans enjoy. This is, of course, partly because of our physical distance from the majority of masterpieces of Western art, and also because of the relative novelty of our national history and treasures.

While the U.S. has many European masterworks in museums, one must make an effort to visit them. We are not surrounded with them as most urban Europeans are. Turn a corner in any major European metropolis and you may find that treasure troves of art and architecture await you. In Italy especially, the sheer volume of exquisite historically and artistically important works is staggering. In Rome or Florence, it seems as if nearly any random block offers a world-class repository of culture to rival anything Americans could muster. One city after another (not to mention little villages and gorgeous hill towns) boasts ancient treasures, Roman monuments, priceless works of every kind. So it is no wonder that people steeped in stories and photos of such masterworks who enjoy and remember their history should be overwhelmed when immersed in the glories of Europe's cultural centers.

I have never had a nervous breakdown in a museum (or anywhere else, for that matter), but I have several times been moved to tears and wonderment before a work of art which I have studied and loved from afar. Here is my favorite example.

When I was 21, my mother and I spent several hectic weeks traveling through the art centers of Italy together in honor of my having completed college. For both my senior theses (I wrote one for my history major and my art history minor) I wrote on art historical subjects. One essay was on 15th century Florentine architecture; the other compared the impact of different sources of patronage (e.g., Italian popes, Spanish monarchs, Flemish churches, Dutch merchants) on the styles and subject matter found in works painted or sculpted by major 17th century Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Flemish artists.

I took night school classes in Italian, since Mills College didn't offer that language, to enrich my art historical studies. When I went to Italy with my mother two months after graduation, all my art historical research and Italian language studies were still fresh in my head, and I was aching to see all the pieces whose photographic representations I'd spent four years swooning over. I had been to Italy on multi-country package tours of Europe in my teens, but this time we were focusing on one country alone and spending days on end in magical cities where we had enough time to seek out the tinier churches that tours usually missed. We were women on a mission.

My mother was as crazy for 16th and 17th century art and architecture as I, and as determined to cram as many masterpieces into our free days as I was. On one swelteringly humid July day in Rome, she and I visited so many churches we lost count. We crisscrossed the city on swollen legs and blistered feet, determined to get one more painting in, view one more astonishing Bernini sculpture, admire another set of volutes or one more baldachin or another monument or reliquary or crumbling edifice. At last, dehydrated and aching, we dragged ourselves into Santa Maria del Popolo in search of a painting neither of us wanted to leave Rome without seeing: Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul.

We hobbled all around the church looking for the chapel we sought, so overwhelmed by pain and fatigue that we had to poke each other to make sure we admired and appreciated the other masterworks all around us. Then we walked around a corner and into the Cerasi Chapel only to find St. Paul lying on the road to Damascus before us. The painting was darkened by time, covered in dust and obscured around the edges by layers of cobwebs. With one of the greatest paintings anyone will ever paint before us, enormous, filthy and exquisite, we simultaneously burst into tears and hugged each other in relief and delight. This painting alone was worth every blister, every step, every night of study, every set of endless marble steps we had climbed throughout the city for six long, hot days.

Finding my way to this painting distilled all I love about art into one perfect moment, just as Caravaggio distilled all that was important about Paul's conversion into one perfect image. For Caravaggio, the moments of most pathos and meaning come when holy figures are brought down to their most elemental humanity and humility. He humbles Christ, the Virgin Mary (whom he painted as bare- and dirty-footed and swollen in death) and St. Paul in his paintings to bring their essential humanity closer to us, so we see that as we are now, so once were they. Unlike someone like Rubens, who elevates powerful human beings to lofty heights, Caravaggio brings holy personages down to the human level so we can empathize with them and love them in a more completely human and heartfelt way.

As painted by Caravaggio, Saul becomes Paul while lying in the dirty, dark road, nearly trampled by his oblivious horse. He is literally knocked off his high horse and blinded so he can be humbled enough that his soul might be exalted in times to come. My experience in making my way to the piece was similar on a small but meaningful scale; my little pilgrimage exhausted and humbled me so that in the midst of all the glories around me after days of being bombarded by the endless masterworks of Rome, I could still be touched profoundly by one old, dusty and perfect painting.

Other works of art have moved me to tears, but I think no first moment with any work of art can surpass the joy I felt in the perfection and purity of that moment with that work of art. Unlike Stendahl in the Uffizi Gallery, I did not need to fall to the floor with arms outstretched in my ecstatic moment. Paul did that for me in his eternal ecstatic moment on the wall of a dark Roman chapel.

But Is It Art?

I take art seriously, and often have very strong opinions about it. There are artists whose technical skill, taste or vision doesn't match mine but whose work I can still respect and admire in some capacity. And there are a few whom I find so weak, irritating or vapid that I'll admit to expressing some scorn for them in private. But while their work may not feel like it merits being described as art according to my internal art-o-meter, I am willing to be liberal in my acceptance of the use of the term "art."

Multiple times, upon learning that I am an artist, I have had people tell me with big smiles and bright eyes that their favorite artist is Thomas Kinkade, and each time I bite my tongue and agree that his works are, um, quite cheerful. We can agree on that. Kinkade, the self-proclaimed "Painter of Light," is less an artist than a kitsch commercial illustrator with massively impressive marketing skills. He does not provide what I look for in an artistic experience, but he moves others, so when his admirers tell me how much they love him, I do my best to show them respect. I may find his work personally offensive in its soft-focus, Kleenex-box-like style and subject matter, but he touches people with his paintings, and their emotional reactions are real and important to them. Kinkade prompts pleasing visceral reactions in them that bring them joy and comfort. So, much as his work turns my stomach, even it is art.

Essayist Joan Didion wrote, "A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire." I must admit to laughing and nodding in agreement when I read those words.

The glowing houses, churches and street lamps in Thomas Kinkade's paintings are so extraordinarily popular because they evoke an instant and comforting emotional reaction in so many people. His imitations of light are meant to bring to mind thoughts and feelings of an idealized old-time American home life: clean, cozy, quaint, old fashioned, oozing charm and warmth. As a nation our taste often runs to the sweet, the peppy, the saccharine, and we admire and appreciate those who serve up our stereotypes in the most sanitized and friendly way. A man who sells reproductions of his paintings in the hundreds of thousands, many touched up with selected highlights by worker bees so that they look more like actual paintings than the cheap copies they are (so they can be sold for hundreds or thousands of dollars each instead of the ten dollars they might be worth), Kinkade understands his market and has grown rich by never underestimating the public’s desire for clichéed and emotionally manipulative imagery. According to Wikipedia, he is estimated to have made $53 million from his art works from 1997 to May 2005 alone. Yikes.

His subject matter, style, technique and execution give me the willies, but his work is art, albeit bad art. Some would disagree with me, saying that merely evoking a cheerful reaction with one’s creations doesn't make one an artist. Art is meant to provoke thought and emotion, to make us ask questions, to inspire discussions, to challenge, to confuse or reward or transform us, some say. Sure, it's meant to do all of that. And Kinkade's work does indeed challenge, provoke and confuse me. But not every piece has to accomplish all of those goals. Art can also exist merely to delight, to embellish, to decorate or to express whatever thought, feeling or impression the artist wishes to convey.

Good art can elevate, or soothe, excite or inspire. A lot of works that I personally revile are still, in my estimation, important art because they successfully innovate, surprise or make me think. Beauty speaks to the soul, and each of us finds beauty in different forms. We seek out things that please our eyes and our hearts. Art does transform, but it can do that through humor or subtlety, elegance, spareness or outrageous joie de vivre. Art can also be kitsch, and sometimes that's a lot of fun. Takashi Murakami's pop-art pieces are terribly popular now, and though my favorites among them look a lot like the vinyl flower power stickers found all over beat-up VW beetles circa 1970, they're fun, fresh and freeing. They're real art.

Art asks questions, but it doesn't need to be in our face and ugly about it; it can also ask us sly and amusing questions. Art provokes, yes: it provokes anger, excitement, disgust, questions or tears. It also provokes laughter or thoughtfulness or merely prods us to stand still and feel. It is not a bad thing to feel comfort or joy or simple pleasure. Schmaltzy art may not be high art, but it is still art. Obvious, twee, soulless wrapping-paper-style paintings and prints may feel like caricatures of landscapes to me, but they bring joy to millions. I look down on an artist's decisions to use his or her technical ability in the service of creating sub-par paintings with trite subjects with no aspirations to be anything more than derivative dreck. But whether I like it or not, it is still art.

Someone like Thomas Kinkade achieves something that many artists of integrity cannot: he manages to evoke strong feelings in many people who view and enjoy his work. Just because those of us with art history degrees may look down on untrained eyes as having inferior taste doesn't mean that the feelings of those without our training aren't real or legitimate. We may denigrate Disney's homogenized, dumbed down and sexist animated fairy tales for blandly pandering to the lowest common denominator, but the fact remains that the technical quality of their work and their theme parks is usually superlative, and their understanding of the needs and desires of their market segment has been remarkably keen for 80 years now. They evoke genuine strong emotion with imagery so powerful that indelible icons come to mind when we think of Disney.

It is upsetting when inferior versions supplant the more elegant, subtle, powerful or beautiful versions in our minds. Disney's Winnie the Pooh animation is nowhere near as gorgeous as Ernest Shepard's original illustrations for A. A. Milne's books are, for example. But Disney's work is still art. It may not be high art, it may not always be good art, but it is valid art, as is Andres Serrano's “Piss Christ” or Robert Mapplethorpe's S&M nudes (or his exquisite flower portraits) or Picasso's “Guernica” or Jeff Koons's ridiculous, goofy and disturbing sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles. Even Koons's images of himself having sex with his real-life porn star ex-wife Cicciolina (who was, incidentally, also a member of the Italian parliament) are works of art, though not art I'd want to own. The art world is more complex and ridiculous than we even know. Just like the real world around us.

Obamarama

Washington state still votes for presidential candidates’ delegates via the antiquated caucus system, and I hate it. It requires that all participating members of a precinct show up at the same time in the same room for 90 minutes or more in the middle of winter, be subjected to statements by anyone who chooses to speak (no matter how ill-informed) and vote publicly, and sometimes repeatedly. Each of these conditions makes it less likely that people will make the effort. People who are working, traveling or ill cannot participate. People without transportation or the money to arrange for it are disadvantaged. Shy or private people have a disincentive to attend, since they’re subjected to argument, crowds and publicity for their closely-held beliefs whether they want to engage in such public displays or not. Those with immune deficiencies because of illness or medical treatment (such as those undergoing chemotherapy) put themselves at risk to attend. It’s inconvenient, coming right in the middle of Saturday, the day we look forward to. Caucus locations don't match polling places and the websites which provide location information get overloaded and go down when they're needed most. It takes determination to be a part of the process.

So what happened this year? Did attendance suffer? On the contrary, caucus stations were filled beyond capacity. People parked a half-mile from the school that held my local caucus. The crowd was too large for the school auditorium in which we assembled and had to spill into the gym. People at stations around the state ran out of ballots and pens. And the vote went overwhelmingly to Barack Obama. Hope may not spring eternal, but it sure as hell got the vote out. Hope, and disgust for our current administration.

I’ve heard a lot of people refer to Obama supporters as Obamabots because so many of his followers do seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid and been mesmerized and hypnotized by the man. For some, devotion borders on the fanatical, and it makes me uncomfortable. But not all of us Obama supporters are voting solely on feel-good platitudes and gut reactions. There are strong reasons to vote for the man that are based in rational thought, and even those who subscribe to a realpolitik-style pragmatism must admit that there are compelling reasons to believe that he can help to wash the U.S. of at least some of our sins in the world’s eyes by leading his fellow citizens in taking responsibility for our actions, remembering that we do not own the world and only make up 6% of the world’s population, and being willing to talk to and consider the ideas and needs of other leaders while standing up for our principles at home. I believe he may be able to help us build a stronger and more admirable foreign policy which allows the rest of the world to approach us with a more conciliatory and friendly stance. After these years of adversarial arrogance, a leader who is willing to listen to and consider other countries’ needs and concerns honestly and see our country as others see us could do us a world of good in the eyes of the rest of the planet. He could make us feel more pride in our place in the world based not on some “America, right or wrong” stance, but because of positions that follow our laws and consider international law as well.

Many people complain that his constant harping on the theme of hope leaves their brains feeling bludgeoned with meaningless buzz-words. I understand. They say they fear that he has no real positions because he does not always mention them in his speeches. But look at the extraordinary following he has built based on this (very clever) choice to emphasize feelings in his public speeches, while providing concrete and strong positions on his website and position papers. When asked directly how he stands on various issues during the debates, he has made clear cases for his positions, but most potential voters don’t want to sit still and watch or listen (or read online or in the paper) the answers to these questions. I have been made uncomfortable by the amount of ardor and excitement people have expressed for the man based on how he makes them feel after beautifully delivered but not always deeply meaningful speeches. I myself have complained to friends that, while I admire him for his actual positions and have heard him speak ardently and eloquently on all manner of subjects for some years now, the text of his most popular speeches rarely stands up to the power of the delivery. I felt nervous about the Oprahfication of his campaign during his tour with Ms. Winfrey in January; it seemed that people who attended his appearances were so hungry for hope and so thrilled to be in the presence of celebrity that mass hysteria was taking over.

I understand the thrill of seeing an ardent, excellent speaker with whom one agrees; I don’t blame people for falling for him after spending time in his presence. It takes a hard heart to hear a speaker of his grace and skill (and political positions!) and not be moved and thrilled. But choosing wisely takes more than a good gut feeling. I fear people voting on their gut reactions because that leads to people voting for people like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, too. A lot of people loved the idea of voting for screen icon Arnold Schwarzenegger in California before they knew anything about his politics because they loved the way he made them feel. Millions find even Mike Huckabee refreshing and charismatic, which leaves me dumbfounded, as I find him vindictive and ignorant.

Fortunately, I like Obama’s manner as well as his stand on most issues. But I fear people loving him because Oprah says to, or just because they think it would make them look good to support a black man. I don’t have trouble with people, all candidates being equal (which they aren’t, but if they were), wanting to vote for a woman or a black man as a way to show societal support for groups that were disenfranchised for so many years, and which still face bigotry and stereotyping, and which could bring fresh perspectives and new international respect to the office and the nation. I’d love to be able to vote for a woman I could feel good about, and if I can vote for a strong, brilliant black man with wonderful values and a solid track record I’ll feel terribly lucky.

It makes me sad that the first viable female candidate the Democrats have been able to offer (with apologies to the late Shirley Chisholm) is a centrist pragmatist who angers huge swaths of U.S. society, who blames “vast right-wing conspiracies” when it's convenient and seems willing to let those in her campaign play dirty while pretending not to. I find it sad that there are 150 million females in this country and she’s the most viable female candidate we’ve ever had. I’m not saying Hillary Clinton isn’t extraordinarily bright, savvy and politically gifted. I will certainly vote for her if Hell (and Texas) freeze over and she is somehow able to end what looks at this point like an Obama juggernaut, since she would be endlessly better for this country than John McCain’s conservatism could ever be. But given the choice between a woman so entrenched in Democratic National Committee-style centrism and a devoted, energetic and extraordinarily articulate (read his latest book if you want proof) man who asks the country to stand up tall, live up to its principles and sacrifice when necessary to do the right (and progressive thing), it’s easy for me to stand up for Barack Obama.

Hillary Clinton’s husband’s presidency (which all agree she had a strong advisory position in) promised so many progressive improvements but that administration frequently reneged on its promises (don’t ask, don’t tell, anyone?), pulled the country to the center and bogged down in the middle and sat there, losing momentum. The state of the country, the economy and civil rights were all much better then, of course, and I’d trust her far more than any Republican of any stripe to lead us to a more stable, constitutionally-run country, but given the choice between her and Obama, my choice is clear.

I’ve been sad and embarrassed to hear feminists like Gloria Steinem imply that women who vote for Obama when they could vote for Clinton are traitors to their gender, and that as a group women have it worse than black men in this country. I’ve considered myself a feminist since I was a child and I read every issue of Ms. Magazine (which Steinem, long one of my heroines, founded in 1973), from the first issue until I was in my mid-20s. I loved Ms., I went to a women’s college, and I was a member of NOW for many years, until I came to believe that they had gone off track and no longer shared my beliefs. I stood up to sexism at work on multiple occasions, and I love that both my senators (and both of the senators from my birth state of California) are female Democrats. I would love to vote for a woman I admired for president, but more than that, I love that I do not have to vote along gender lines, but have the choice to vote for the best person for the job. I love that I do not have to choose allegiance to my gender (or race) before allegiance to my principles and to my beloved Constitution.

To me, feminism is a branch of humanism; I approach people of either gender (and any race or mix of races) as deserving my respect unless they prove otherwise, and all the work of feminists (and other civil rights activists) who came before me and paved the way to a more just and equal society helped me to believe that I could put the humanity and decency of others before not only their gender but also their race or sexual orientation. I am relieved that if I cannot feel best voting for a woman, I can at least vote for a black man, which makes my choice not to support the strongest-ever female U.S. presidential candidate less painful.

I’m delighted to have the chance to vote for a black man and to show the world, especially Africa and the Middle East, that we can see someone who isn’t just another white man of Northern European descent as worthy of elevation, leadership and admiration. There is so much resentment and anger toward us, especially in Muslim regions, it would be exciting and I think hugely beneficial to show the world that a man of African descent whose father’s family was Muslim is not automatically denigrated or denounced in our country, despite the huge numbers of bigoted fear-mongers among us who fear Islam and see it only as a source of violent anti-Americanism. I also admire his emphasis on treating others (be they individuals or nations) with respect and diplomacy. A great man or woman, like a great nation, listens to others and engages with them in a manner that honors their humanity. Others will not take heed if they don't feel there is a core of respect for them. We don't have to agree with them, but we should not be so arrogant as to refuse to listen.

Obama himself is Christian; sadly, he would be unelectable in this country otherwise. And he’s actually half-black and half-white, which is pleasing in that he himself would be a wonderful symbol of the intermixed, interracial makeup of our nation. He chooses to identify himself as black, and our country has a long and sordid history of considering any amount of “black blood” a taint so foul that for several hundred years anyone with a single black great-grandparent was considered completely black as a mark of inferiority and shame, and his or her rights were accordingly diminished to the same state as a person of fully African-American parentage. I admire his desire to consider his blackness something to be so prized and honored that he chooses to consider it one of the most salient characteristics in defining him, much as I wish it didn’t matter so much to the populace.

No, I don’t think Obama’s perfect. I do wish he had more experience in national office. But I do think he’s run a cleaner campaign than his primary rival, I think his record is strong, his long history of public service exemplary, his ability to determine the crux of the issues keen, and his awareness of our place in the world and his desire to be a good world citizen as well as a good American citizen laudable. I desperately hope that our next president, whether Obama or Clinton, will have the chance to choose Supreme Court justices whose decisions will help to bolster our sagging civil rights and undo some of the damage that has been done and will continue to be done to us by Bush appointees. While I do think there are distinctions worth noting between Obama and Clinton, and I do feel his platform is closest to my ideals and goals for the country, I recognize that they are quite close in their opinions over all, and this gives me comfort and hope. Either one would be a huge improvement over the disgusting administration we’ve suffered under these past seven years.

The next time someone tells you there’s no difference between parties and that it doesn’t matter who’s elected president, politely mention that the makeup of the Supreme Court determines their day-to-day rights in thousands of areas of daily life. Presidents determine the composition of the court and all sorts of rights, from habeus corpus to abortion to adoption to marriage to the death penalty to income taxes, depend on those nine people. When they tell you presidential party doesn’t matter, ask them whether they think Democrats would have started the war that’s cost trillions of dollars, perhaps a million Iraqi lives, harmed or killed tens of thousands of American soldiers and damaged hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens’ families. Which party has the most members who don’t believe in global warming? Evolution? The Geneva Conventions? Not my party. It matters.

It matters, it matters, it matters.

The Verb "To Pimp"

A couple of weeks ago, television commentator David Shuster got into trouble for asking on MSNBC’s Hardball program whether Hillary Clinton had “pimped out” her daughter Chelsea by putting her to work as a fresh new face and spokesperson for her mother on the campaign trail. Hillary was outraged by the use of the term, found it offensive in the extreme and called for his head; MSNBC responded by suspending him temporarily. This episode brought up several issues: one is whether it’s fair of the press to follow Chelsea’s private life now that she is acting as a shill for her mother; the other is what is an appropriate use of the word “pimp.” Guy Branum wrote an interesting article on the first topic in Slate.com on February 11; Jesse Sheidlower discussed the second topic in a separate article published in Slate on the same day. I’d like to address both issues.

Let’s address the question of the appropriateness of dragging Chelsea Clinton into the limelight. All her life her parents have been extremely tenacious of her right to have a private life and have gone after those who intruded on Chelsea’s personal space and private activities like bulldogs. Most people have found this admirable; we don’t like to see parents trotting their children out and using them as tools to garner public sympathy.

But Chelsea is no longer a child; she is 28 years old, and she has chosen of her own free will to appear in public on her mother’s behalf. If the Clintons see fit to trot her out, it can only be because they feel she is an appealing and attractive surrogate for her mother who demonstrates that Hillary Clinton is not only successful in her public life, but has raised an exceedingly bright, successful, polite and socially astute daughter. It is exactly because she is a symbol that the media want to learn more about her: is she an appropriate symbol? What can we learn about her parents by examining her? If she and her parents have decided that she should play a public and ongoing role in the campaign, it is only fair that members of the press ask about the reasons why. When Hillary Clinton presents her child to the world in her stead, we must ask what the point is, and if she won’t tell us, we have the right to express the question.

David Shuster’s cynical and ugly terminology was totally inappropriate, and there seems to have been a nastiness to the idea behind it as well. I believe he used the objectionable term “pimped out” solely to convey the idea of displaying or using the charms or talents of another person for one’s own gain, but even as he made the comment, he was hedging and implying that he realized the term was loaded.

However, the idea behind his badly-worded comment was valid. Cynical, but valid. I believe that question is, What is the point of using Chelsea on the campaign? Furthermore, why is it suddenly okay to do so now? Why have the Clintons decided that it’s appropriate to put their daughter on constant public display now when they know full well her personal life, behavior, friends and opinions will be even more thoroughly scrutinized as a result? They have always contended that anyone who pried into her life was beneath contempt, but in using her in this way, they have to be aware that they’re opening her life up for even more sustained attention. It is, of course, her right as an adult to help her mother out in this way; I find Chelsea Clinton admirable for being willing to make the personal sacrifices necessary. But for her family to pretend that as a 28-year-old out on the hustings for her mom she’s as far off limits as she was as a 13-year-old is ridiculous.

The primary historical use of the verb “to pimp” means to solicit sexual partners for someone else and to benefit financially from the exchange. As a parent, if someone accused me of pimping my daughter, even in a purely metaphorical sense, I would also be outraged and incensed. Though she is much older than I, Hillary Clinton and I both come from a time when we knew of no attractive or appealing usage of the word “pimp.” Every possible meaning she and I were exposed to was offensive and ugly.

Since the Shuster dustup, I’ve heard a number of people under 30 complaining that they don’t get what the fuss is all about. They’re so used to seeing “to pimp” in a whole new and positive context: to decorate, to make more attractive, to show off one’s desirability or power. When they think of “pimping” they think of showing themselves or their possessions off in high style, and think of television shows like “Pimp My Ride” where cars are overhauled and go from blah to wow—at least according to those who admire a high bling factor.

The new use of the term is so common that millions of young people don’t realize how recently its meaning changed, and how loaded and offensive the term is to most people born before 1980. But David Shuster is 40 years old; he should be aware of how loaded and offensive the term is. There’s no excuse for his resorting to it when there are more precise and appropriate ways of getting to the root question.

I disagree that the word “pimp” is now so commonly used that the age-old offensive sexual meaning no longer competes with more recent meanings. Kids may believe that the term no longer carries offensive sexual overtones, but to most of the populace the first meaning of the verb “to pimp” remains an ugly one referring to people who benefit financially from the sexual degradation of others. Many people don’t mind using “pimped out” or “pimp my ride” in mixed company because they think of it as a term implying over-the-top fashion or a youthful hipness that they’d like to co-opt for themselves. It’s obvious that legions of people no longer give thought to the fact that the term has for centuries referred to (and continues to refer to) a man who subjects women to humiliation, duress and physical, legal and psychological dangers for his own gain. But millions haven’t forgotten the meaning of the word just because an alternate meaning has become popular over the past decade.

Even among young people who admit that the first use of the word refers to someone who procures customers for a prostitute, the term has lost its sting because so many younger people no longer see pimping (that is, making money as a procurer for sex workers) as offensive. They now see sex workers and those in their orbit as becoming ever-closer to the mainstream. Over the past decade, our culture has embraced a certain pimp and ho chic; pornography may not be completely mainstream, but it’s so pervasive and such a lucrative, easily accessible and popular form of entertainment now that hardcore porn style and terminology are now freely accessible and attractive to middle-schoolers. Disturbingly large numbers of teens are quite knowledgeable about porn, from its techniques to its accoutrements.

Many girls now compete to look as much like professional sex workers as possible, not only on reality television shows but also when they choose the clothes they wear to school or select the entertainment they provide at sweet sixteen parties. It's no wonder. Britney Spears’ earliest videos showed her vamping for the camera in extra-short schoolgirl clothing in a blatant appeal to pederastic fantasists. Christina Aguilera and other hot young singers vie for spots on the Pussycat Dolls stage, dressing like hookers, bumping, grinding and stripping as a way to build their public image and sell more CDs. And it works. Porn style becomes more pervasive all the time: breast implants and Brazilian waxes are now commonplace enough to discuss over suburban brunches.

There are some who view this as pro-sexual empowerment of women: “Look at me! I claim my sexuality and am not afraid to flash my crotch to show you how powerful I’ve become!” Pole dancing and faux-lesbian bumping and grinding are now commonplace concert and video cliches. They’re packaged and presented in a way meant to sexually excite men and play to their fantasies, but the only power women get out of it is the power to tease—to excite and then deny satisfaction. Their power is only an extension of their desire to trade sex for what they want. Nor is it even the power to demand their own sexual satisfaction. It is solely the power to prove that they can elicit a sexual response in others, then not fulfill this promise unless they get something of commercial value in exchange.

This kind of perpetually-titillating sexualized social interaction encourages women to believe that their power rests in their ability to focus on and then frustrate those who wield real power. It encourages men to continue to see women as sending mixed messages, to believe that maybe no doesn’t really mean no, and to believe that sex is all about what men want, and that satisfaction requires considering only their own needs and denying women their power. It’s about playing games to heighten excitement, but where do we go from there? And how does that spill into other ways that men and women interrelate in the rest of their lives? I fear that hypersexualization of young people and the presentation of sex as something women promise and then deny in order to gain power (and that men overcome women’s will to get) is a huge step backward for women and men both. Selfishness, force, game-playing and denial all build frustration and walls. And they’re not that great for sex, either.

I’m not against people acknowledging their sexuality. I have no problem with adults reveling in the pleasure of exercising their sexual power with other consenting adults as they see fit. I’m not even against legalizing prostitution, disturbing as I may find the concept personally, since legalization would allow women who have chosen that work to stand up for their rights to represent themselves and not to have to rely on pimps for “protection” from the law or from others who would harm them. They would be more likely to seek proper health care, which would keep themselves and their tricks (and their tricks’ partners) safer, and they would have legal recourse when threatened.

But our odd American puritan streak has so strangled healthy, honest sexual awareness and communication that lust has had to work its way up and out in convoluted forms and formats. It’s disingenuous and dangerous when a culture denies and demonizes people’s basic sexual underpinnings yet at the same time incorporates them into its youth culture so completely that everything is sexualized but no one will admit it.

Advocating abstinence-only sex education and denying teens the right to easy access to contraception and health care is hypocritical and unrealistic, and is totally insufficient preparation in a world which whets sexual appetites and debases sexuality at the same time. Girls are told at home, in houses of worship and even sometimes in their classrooms that they’re weak-willed, dirty sluts unless they’re abstinent till marriage, and they learn that it’s a sin to acknowledge their sexual feelings. If they want to show that they’re basically “good,” they learn not to prepare themselves properly for sex or follow safe sex guidelines when they put themselves in situations where they’re likely to be sexual.

They’re also taught by different but equally persuasive segments of society that their most valuable commodity, which can be traded for power and money, is their sexual attractiveness. If they get “carried away” and end up having unprotected sex, then somehow they’re not as slutty as they would be if they thought ahead, acknowledged what they wanted to do, and had a supply of condoms with them. Meanwhile, the songs, TV shows, websites and movies they like tell them they should be teasing men like whores; their families and houses of worship call them bad if they think ahead and admit that they’re actively sexual creatures.

Talk about mixed messages!

A New Twist

Last year was the year of assemblages with metallic twists for me. In 2007 I put hundreds of hours into creating dozens of assemblages on canvas using yards and yards of wire and metal mesh. I put my years of jewelry-making experience to work as I incorporated gems, pearls and glass beading into several of my pieces. I'm revving up to make more pieces with those materials, but I'm itching to spend more time with the great materials found in nature in 2008. So many excitingly textured materials are made by animals, insects and plants, and I can't wait to mix and match them with the other treasures slowly taking over my studio. I'll be writing more about my new pieces, the art workshops I lead at the Ground Zero Teen Center, and other random musings on art on my Web site, www.lauragrey.com, throughout the year. You'll find my artist's statements there, and links to my online galleries of drawings, paintings and, especially, assemblages. Drop by any time.

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?

My San Francisco

I was born in San Francisco and lived all my life within an hour’s drive of The City (as Bay Area natives call it) till I moved to to the Northwest in 1997. I never lived in San Francisco itself after my first six weeks in an incubator there, but it always felt like my city, and I’m protective of it and of my memories of its most beautiful and special places.

I love Coit Tower—the WPA-era murals inside it, the views of the bay and San Francisco from its apex, even the shape of the building itself. I remember when Union Square still looked like it does in Francis Ford Coppola’s great thriller, “The Conversation.” As a child, my mother and I would go into The City at Christmastime to stare at the gorgeous windows around Union Square and visit the City of Paris building (demolished by Neiman-Marcus in 1981, the bastards), a lovely beaux-arts-style landmark. We filled our tummies on the great soups at Salmagundi on Geary Street before seeing Peter Donat or Philip Anglim on stage at ACT across the street, and I savored the thick coffee milkshakes at Bill’s Place on Clement Street. Years later I went back to Clement to spend endless happy hours browsing art and design ideas at Green Apple Books.

During my college years I loved dancing at the I-Beam in the Haight (as did Rock Hudson when he was in town) and shopping for neon plastic sunglasses, watches and funky New Wave everything at the Headlines stores on Polk Street and Castro Street, each nestled among sex shops and leather bars and populated with adorable twinks. During the nineties I got married in the exquisite San Francisco City Hall building (Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio did the same thing in the 1950s), and had some of the best meals of my life at Greens, the famous vegetarian restaurant in the Marina district. I loved having afternoon tea in the Fairmont’s Cirque Room to celebrate a special occasion, or meeting friends in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel before showing them around my favorite parts of the city.

I even miss freezing my tuchis up at the Marin Headlands just across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking down at spectacular views of San Francisco (please, don’t ever call my city Frisco) while gusts of cold wind blew my hair straight back and turned my ears first red, then white with cold. (And that was in the summer; in winter it felt positively polar up there.) I wish I could duck into the Musée Mechanique just below Cliff House and enjoy 80-year-old mechanical fortune tellers and player pianos for a few bucks’ worth of quarters again, but it’s moved to Pier 45 at Fisherman's Wharf. I'm glad it still exists, but in its old location, under the boardwalk, it seemed so pleasingly down-at-the-heels. Fisherman's Wharf, while no longer as skanky a place as I knew (and avoided) from childhood, still boasts enough seedy spots to remind me why I've never liked it.

One of my favorite (and most frequent) San Francisco destinations over the years was Golden Gate Park, from its lakes to the elegant glass domed Conservatory of Flowers (one of the world’s largest) to the meadows full of tiny daisies. My father took me there with VW-loads of his hippie friends in the 1960s when I was very small. I remember passing through the Haight-Ashbury district to get there in the late sixties and early seventies and knowing even as a little child that the Haight, and the U.C. Berkeley campus, which my father also took me to, were the places to find hippie culture. (My parents were both students at Cal when they met, and my mom followed the more traditional Cal values while my father took the other road.) I think our sojourns to the epicenters of the counterculture were his attempts at balancing out what he thought was his daughter’s overly mainstream, white-bread, suburban world.

I always felt out of place when visiting my father and hanging out with his scruffy friends during my infrequent visits with him. I felt weird because of my comparative lack of weirdness among these people. At least during Dad’s visits we were were often hanging out in attractive city parks full of impressive things to see and interesting people to gawp at. My father wanted me to see hairy, lefty urban culture as an antidote to what he saw as sleepy, conservative, stultifying suburban values. Sadly, he and his friends and their choices emphasized all the scarier aspects of hippie culture instead of showing me the fresher, freer, more positive aspects. They may have loved countercultural values for their anti-war, anti-establishment elements, and I can admire those aspects, too, at a nearly forty-year remove from the experience. But what I saw and shrank from even as a very tiny child were physically dirty folks with stoned expressions who made a lot of jokes about sex that they thought I didn’t understand, and a father who picked up stray hitchhikers and invited them into his succession of coughing VW Beetles while he drove down foggy streets on dark nights whether I was in the car or not.

Dad also took me to graveyards for picnics occasionally; this scared me at the time, but I wonder whether my own penchant for old cemeteries grew out of these odd al fresco afternoons. On my few overnight visits, Dad thought it funny to have me sleep on a daybed made up under a bookcase that featured a real human skull as a decorative element. My father and his friends had no clue what was appropriate behavior around a small child, listened to me only sporadically and then laughed at whatever I said without explaining to me why my opinions or questions were so funny. I felt lonely among them, and just as much a misfit among hippies as I did around the suburban folks I grew up among.

But I always loved visiting Golden Gate Park, whether with my dad and his deadhead pals, with my beloved uncle on a trip to the Steinhart Aquarium, or with my mom on our way to the de Young Museum. The Japanese Tea Garden had (and still has) koi ponds, melt-in-your-mouth almond cookies and an impossibly steep Japanese bridge to climb, and there were free opera and band concerts at the band shell between the aquarium and the de Young. I enjoyed the whole park, but oh, how I loved the de Young. That’s where I first saw King Tut’s golden mummy case, treasures from the time of of Alexander the Great, Van Gogh’s Sunflowers and so many important visiting exhibitions. Even when there wasn’t a blockbuster show there, the de Young was like a visual sampler platter of art, craft and design through the ages. Like other grand old art collections in grand old buildings around the country, one found rooms full of elegant furniture, hallways lined with vitrines stocked with porcelain and fine silver pieces, small portraits and sweeping landscapes, all in a building that had a history and a personality of its own.

Visiting the de Young felt kind of like stepping into an eccentric old aunt’s mansion, but one built in a distinctly Californian style, not like the darker, heavier mansions-based art museums of the East Coast (which I’ll admit I also love). When I was little, the best part for me was going into the central hall lined with suits of armor and banners. It was like a grand baronial space, a dramatic fantasy place where I stepped out of time. The museum was welcoming and of its time, and I loved it.

The de Young that I loved so was a gracious Spanish-style building built in 1919 with a lovely tower built in 1921. It had a simple stucco exterior and flanked by palm trees and a stood behind a pond. Its style was very Californian. A number of buildings on the Mills College campus in nearby Oakland, including my beautiful dormitory, Olney Hall, were built in the same simple Californian stucco, beam and tile-roofed architectural style around the same time. This 1910s and '20s Californian version of the Spanish style has always appealed to me as carrying a number of the elements and proportions found in the Arts & Crafts bungalows built at the time while also incorporating some of the state’s Spanish mission and rancho past. Architect Julia Morgan (most famous for designing the much grander Hearst Castle) used it to good effect in several buildings on the Mills College campus, including the Margaret Carnegie Library, where I worked part-time in the Albert M. Bender Rare Book Room during all four of my years at Mills. This style is unpretentious and it fits into the Californian landscape, and even when built on a grand scale, its simplicity keeps it from overwhelming its occupants. It was a lovely and elegant complement to the art of the de Young.

And now it’s gone.

The huge Loma Prieta earthquake of October 1989 damaged the de Young so profoundly that it was eventually found seismically unsafe. Retrofitting the building didn’t make financial sense to San Francisco voters, and in 1998 they voted to demolish it and replace it. It was torn down and the new de Young’s construction began in 2001. And then some lurking evil force settled into the brains of those in charge of the new design like a malevolent worm. It somehow ate away at their good sense and at any desire they might once have had to create a welcoming public space that both enhanced the art-viewing experience and invited the visitor to linger and appreciate the space itself. Gone were gracious details, human-scaled spaces, architectural echoes of the region’s design history or cultural history, and architectural context for historical pieces. The museum’s designers, architects, directors and private funders instead described the old de Young’s design with sneers and scorn. They couldn’t wait to rip it down and erase any visual reminders of it, save the palm trees that used to surround it. Considering it outdated, tired and ugly, they stated that their new building design sought "to communicate diversity; it is an embodiment of the open-ended concept of art fostered by the museum. It expresses the distinctiveness of different cultures and, at the same time, it is a place of common ground, where diversity meets and intersects, where otherwise hidden kinships between divergent cultural forms become visible and tangible."

Oh yeah? Could have fooled me. It’s the ugliest museum I have ever seen.

I’ll write more about it soon.

I'm a Living Dickens Character!

This week I learned that Charles Dickens invented me in 1872! I had no idea. Look, I have proof: click here.

I feel so much more important now. It’s wonderful to learn that I’m a figment of my favorite novelist’s imagination. I suppose this means I must take up wearing crinolines and corsets, speak in dulcet-toned King's English all the time and faint more often. Well, if it means enjoying carriage rides through London, attending regular afternoon tea parties, wearing Victorian hats and going on long walks through Dickens’ imagination, perhaps it’s worth it.

Maybe I'm Crazy

Okay, so I’m slow. I only just caught on to Gnarls Barkley’s music. I’d heard and enjoyed “Crazy” before, but somehow my ears really opened up to it last week. I’ve been listening to them a lot and enjoying their videos, which are so clever and cool, on You Tube. I love their wonderful inkblot video.

I think Cee-Lo’s vocals are gorgeous; he has a smooth Motown-style falsetto that sounds warm and perfectly natural, not forced like some do, and Danger Mouse's production is delicious. Their rhythms are totally infectious and they’ve got a lovely gospel thing going on, too. Tasty. I love their sense of humor, too; Cee-Lo dressed like Darth Vader at the 2006 MTV Movie Awards, they dressed like droogs from “A Clockwork Orange” for other photos. My favorite is this spot-on "Napoleon Dynamite" send-up.

“Crazy” songs seem to work for me. I love Seal’s early hit “Crazy” (and his later acoustic version of it), and of course Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” is perfection. Willie Nelson made something like $50 for writing that song, and Patsy’s version went on to become the all-time top jukebox single. With reason. Willie’s versions are beautiful too, much softer, as if he’s accepted that his love is a hopeless cause. Patsy seems unconvinced that it was really so crazy to fall in love; Patsy's version of the song is so addictive because when she sings it, her torch still burns so brightly. Her head knows it’s crazy, but her heart still hopes. “The heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

I'll write more on museums soon. In the meantime, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season and have kind, funny, open-hearted people to spend it with. I wish you peace and happiness, now and always.

Wowed by Denver's Splendid Art Museum

Last month I visited Denver for the first time, and was wowed by the fabulous weather (sunny and 72 degrees in November!), the inviting and attractive mix of historical and brand-new architecture, the friendly locals, the city’s progressive vibe, and, especially, by the Denver Art Museum, which I can now call one of my favorite regional museums in the country.

San Francisco’s De Young Museum and the Seattle Art Museum were both renovated recently at enormous expense with mixed results. In contrast, the money, thought and care Denver has poured into the expansion of its most important art museum is successful on many levels. This is primarily because DAM's designers and curators never forgot that the point of having an art museum is to create a positive, exciting and enriching environment for all sorts of people that helps them to enjoy, understand and grow more intimately acquainted with art.

A great civic building should not be an impressive but intimidatingly impersonal temple to the arts that sets the work on display apart from humanity, only to make people feel smaller, less connected and more confused as a result. Often, proponents of modern architecture dedicated to the arts take the view that a fresh, modern approach requires that the building and the art experienced within it must be spare, cold, harsh and huge. I find that such buildings (and such viewpoints) dwarf the soul and undermine both the art and the viewers’ experiences of the art. Those of us who prefer a warmer, more human (and more humane) arts experience are usually left clinging to the old ways and the old styles of display and design if we want to enjoy artworks in an atmosphere that isn’t devoid of charm or feeling. While I love many antique and classic architectural styles and can derive great pleasure from viewing artworks housed in them, I can also take pleasure in the clean lines, fresh perspectives and bold breaks with the past that modernity has to offer. That is, I can enjoy them if the purpose of the building and the needs of its visitors (and appropriate display of its contents) are all taken into consideration as well.

There are alternatives to the bleak, forbidding, humorless and sometimes artistically anorexic big-box museums popping up like pox around the world. San Francisco has the Museum of Modern Art, which is massive and impressive but broken up into digestible chunks of architectural space so that one can enjoy soaring curves and architectural leaps toward the sky from within the building without feeling dwarfed and swallowed by it. The Bellevue Arts Museum has grand vertical spaces in its entry hall, but the floorspace isn’t overwhelmingly large, and the mix of colors, windows, materials and artworks in the space keeps it from being too intimidating. Indeed, most of the museum is broken up into small galleries that allow the primarily intimately-scaled works they feature to be enjoyed without feeling lost or dwarfed by an overscaled, overly bright display space.

When I saw photographs of the Denver Art Museum’s new Hamilton Building I was at first disappointed. The building, which houses about half of the museum’s holdings (the rest are in the more sedate building across the street and connected to the Hamilton Building by a skybridge), was meant by architect Daniel Libeskind to imply the craggy triangular shapes of the Rocky Mountains. This is a respectful nod to the region’s geography, but to me it looked in photographs like a colossal pile of broken glass with huge spikes jutting out into the surrounding plaza in what I feared would be an intimidating fashion. I expected to find it as numbingly offputting as I find Rem Koolhaas’ design for the Seattle Public Library, which looms menacingly over downtown Seattle in sharp, cold, übergeometric fashion.

I find the Seattle Public Library's geometric shapes aggressively, threateningly angular, completely counter to anything found in nature, oversized and overscale, and too unyielding in style and material. When my daughter visited it shortly after it opened, she noted that even its children's section features hard, cold, unwelcoming surfaces and furnishings. Koolhaas’s library, so roundly praised by professional architects, feels claustrophobic to me despite all its glass; the large scale of the diamond-shaped metal grid covering the building makes me feel like a bug crushed beneath a window screen when I am inside the building. The library is oddly scaled and full of unusable spaces yet lacking in enough room to give those browsing the book stacks space to amble and view the books without feeling rather squashed. The building has been praised for bringing nature inside, but I find this laughable. The unattractive and half-dead grasses around and inside the building look weedy, and the grass-patterned carpeting inside only makes the rest of the interior look that much more divorced from nature and natural forms, most importantly including human beings, whose presence within the pile of offset oddly-angled glass blocks seems to be an afterthought. Rather than being a welcoming place in which to study, rest, read, browse, learn and renew, the place has all the welcoming cheer of an airport terminal. Less, actually; many airports, including Seattle’s, are quite full of friendly, inviting public artworks, from inlaid metal salmon swimming along one terminal’s floors to columns covered in intricate mosaic designs to exceptionally pretty stained glass windows that evoke Northwest Indian designs and stories.

But I digress. Yes, the Denver Art Museum’s spiky glass hull does loom a bit over visitors, but it sits in a splendid plaza, a welcoming public space bordered by an appealing glass multiuse building as well as by a practical and lovely modern library complex composed of buildings that reminded me of castles, towers and Monopoly houses, among other pleasing simple shapes. There is a giant sculpture of two cattle next to the museum, "Scottish Angus Cow and Calf" by Dan Ostermiller, which was voted the “Best Climbable Art" by locals, and an enormous Claes Oldenburg sculpture of a dustpan and broom right out front; it is hard not to smile when viewing either of these monumental yet whimsical works. Upon viewing DAM in its architectural context, one gets an immediate impression that those responsible for designing, making and presenting this plaza had not only panache and vision, but also well-developed senses of humor. A major arts center that doesn’t take itself too seriously? How refreshing!

Once inside DAM, the boldly scaled building is broken into component spaces that work with each other seamlessly, giving a sense of an inviting multitude of options without overwhelming the visitor and making her feel insignificant. Ceilings are dropped and comfy yet modern chairs are sized for humans. From the main floor’s small café, one can sit and admire the quirky furnishings that make up several relaxed conversation areas, view the main entrance, the ticket-purchasing area, get a glimpse into the well-stocked gift shop through a triangle of glass and watch a slideshow of images of artworks through another triangular cut-out in a wall. It’s easy to get one’s bearings at a glance and feel that one’s immediate needs have been considered and are easy to fulfill: snacks here, tickets there, comfy conversation area here, gift shop there, stairs to the special exhibition there, views out into the inviting plaza here.

Once upstairs, one finds generous exhibition spaces and many delightful resting spots, small libraries and fascinating exhibits explaining art conservation methods incorporating beautiful pieces from the museum’s permanent collection. There are attractive and comfortable areas for rest and research scattered everywhere, each different and appropriate to the style and content of the gallery. Child-friendly spaces attract people of all ages with interactive lights and activities. Colorfully painted walls act as invigorating backdrops that make artworks pop, a welcome alternative to the sterile and generic white or grey galleries favored at some newly minted museums. The museum is proud of its gallery of Western art, which I expected to find as uninspiring and hackneyed as an old episode of “Bonanza.” Boy, was I wrong. It housed my favorite works in the museum, a series of twenty 12x12-inch paintings of different grasses by Karen Kitchel, in addition to excellent paintings of cowboys, Indians and animals and the expected Frederick Remington horse-and-cowboy sculptures and paintings (which are actually quite impressive).

Just beyond the Western gallery is the skybridge to DAM’s other building, which houses an imposing and impressive gallery of Native American/Indian/First People’s artworks including masks, paintings, sculptures and fiber art. There was also a visiting exhibition of color field paintings that left me unmoved, but which was full of important works by influential artists, few of whom I like. Still, it was an appropriate and important juxtaposition to the rest of the museum’s holdings and to the other main visiting show at the time, an assortment of works of decorative art (from chandeliers to dishes to tapestries) on loan from Paris titled "Artisans & Kings: Selected Treasures from the Louvre."

The scale, the high quality of the artworks in the collection, the breadth of work on display, the excellent libraries and reference rooms scattered about, the attractive and appropriate design of the galleries, and the awareness of the museum’s planners regarding how the museum fits into its metropolitan surroundings both physically and metaphorically all work together to make the Denver Art Museum a great success aesthetically and culturally for people of any artistic persuasion, be it traditional or minimalist, abstract or figurative. The restaurants and gift shops are even well thought out, as are the sizes and layouts of the public spaces. Denver has a lot going for it that makes it worth a visit, but for me, just having another chance to enjoy DAM (and to see the wonderful 40-foot-tall blue bear sculpture at the Colorado Convention Center) will be worth the trip.

LauraGrey.com is Now Online

Laura Grey Fine Arts is online at www.lauragrey.com. Please take a look; from there you can read artist's statements, link to online galleries, find contact and biographical information, and visit this blog.

Museumania!

Over the past six months I’ve had the good fortune to visit eight important regional art museums in the West and Northwest. This summer I entered the recently reborn and outwardly Azkaban-like de Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park only to find that this new bunker of a building (complete with looming guard tower) has absolutely none of the charm and grace of the old, Spanish style de Young I spent so many happy hours in, which was devastated by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The new de Young has many minimalists in an ecstatic thrall; I loathed its exterior as I never have any museum before or since. It has won prizes for accessibility, which is commendable, but these photos meant to celebrate it show how stark and unwelcoming its courtyard is. There were some pleasing surprises inside, but the architecture got in the way of the art more than once, even once inside its hideous walls.

The delightful San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), on the other hand, is bold and modern, yet it offers both a nod to the art historical past (its graphic black and white horizontal lines echo those of Siena's cathedral) and the interior provides an attractive yet unobtrusive backdrop to any art displayed within its walls. Its architecture, inside and out, is as big and beautiful a success as the de Young’s is a failure.

A highlight of my pilgrimage through the museums of the West was the Portland Art Museum. This was due less to the museum itself (which is a lovely place) than to the excitement of seeing some of my favorite 17th century Dutch masterpieces in the “Rembrandt and the Golden Age of Dutch Art: Treasures from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam” show. The exhibition was breathtaking. I haven’t seen so many perfectly executed small masterpieces in one place since I last visited my favorite American shrines to art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (home to the most wonderful array of John Singer Sargent portraits anywhere) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. At PAM I saw one exquisite work after another by some of my favorite artists working during my favorite era in one of my favorite locations on earth. I was dumbstruck by the perfection of the technique of artist after artist. I found that the delicacy and immediacy of the Rembrandt etchings on display rendered them even more touching than the Rembrandt paintings they featured, and when I got to one of my favorite Frans Hals portraits, I wept for the sheer joy of seeing it again.

In August I ventured up to British Columbia and enjoyed the lovely but relatively small Vancouver Art Gallery. With only about 9,000 works of art in the collection, it is still the grandest art museum in the city though it has just a tiny fraction of number of pieces found in San Francisco or Seattle. Vancouver staged a pleasing traveling show, “Monet to Dalí: Modern Masters from the Cleveland Museum of Art.” There were no standout masterpieces to take my breath away; it was a useful overview for comparing and contrasting various important artists' styles and influence, but their greatest work wasn't on display. It was no blockbuster.

I quite enjoyed the Bellevue Art Museum’s extensive and beautifully curated show titled “Raymond Loewy: Designs for a Consumer Culture” which displayed the work of the brilliant and influential mid-20th century industrial designer. The transformation of BAM from another pleasant midlevel regional art museum to a showcase for craft and design as well as “fine art” over the past few years has been very successful artistically, even if their endless financial woes don’t ever seem to ebb completely. I give them kudos for coming up with some startlingly inventive and beautiful shows featuring calligraphy, beadwork, textiles, woodwork and assemblage, among other offerings.

Seattle’s Frye Museum always provides a quirky mix of fresh new, sometimes painfully in-your-face or self-conscious pieces and delicious little gems. During the ten years I’ve been going there, the museum has been consistently original and unusual in the artists it has chosen to showcase. Some I can’t stand, others amuse and delight me. They’ve had some particularly exciting and interesting photography shows over the years, and offered a terrific survey of comic strip art that I still remember years after the fact. Their permanent collection of primarily mid-19th century Mitteleuropean art bequeathed by the founders of the museum is mostly sedate and often academic, but still quite pretty. It includes a dark, erotically-charged and dangerous-seeming painting by Franz von Stuck, “Sin” (“Die Suende”) that’s a real crowd pleaser. It is rehung and reimagined in various forms for different shows nearly every year.

This past week I made it to the Seattle Art Museum, which reopened six months ago after a major expansion and a billion (with a B) dollars worth of new acquisitions. I found some of it very successful, and some quite disappointing. It is huge now, and I was barely able to see a third of it in the two hours I spent there. I plan to return in December to see the second half of the very enjoyable two-part show called “Japan Envisions the West” and to try to get into all the galleries I didn’t even glance into. I should spend more time there before I presume to grade how successful it is over all. I’m afraid it was much less impressive, appealing or approachable than the Denver Art Museum’s dramatic new Hamilton Building, designed by architect Daniel Libeskind and opened to the public a year ago. I found it at first off-puttingly spiky from the outside, but I was captivated by the giant Claes Oldenburg broom and dustpan sculpture out front and have so many positive things to say about all they did right inside. (I've loved Oldenburg since I was six.) And I will say those positive things here, very soon. Over the coming weeks I plan to write a little more about my experiences in each of these museums. Stay tuned. And don't forget to check out my own artworks at www.lauragrey.com.