It’s been a few months since my last trip to the de Young, and I managed to squeeze in a quick, almost closing time visit to the museum, after spending an afternoon at the Legion of Honor.
My opinion of the museum remains - it somehow seems incredibly badly organized and I’ve become convinced that the building itself is the source of the trouble. I can’t seem to get past the idea that each room was put together as a reflex of some kind, with the curators just phoning in their jobs. There are tremendous objects in the de Young, and I can’t seem to feel intimate with them. I can’t put my finger on it, though.
I’ve spoken with several other artists, both in and out of the Bay Area, and no one I’ve talked to seems to enjoy the new museum. Maybe it just looked good on paper, or in theory, and it doesn’t work out in the real world. Maybe it needs some time, and maybe some new acquisitions and curatorial staff to really find itself. Art writer Tyler Green has been going on about the shockingly dumb placement of bars over the murals in the Piazzoni room, which is a piss poor way to protect the works (which it doesn’t), that serves no direct purpose other than to interfere with the viewer’s experience.
As always, all of my de Young photos are in my Flickr set, the pieces below are just ones I want to run on about here.
above - William Morris, Canoptic Jar - Buck - My current fixation on deer and deer-like animals of all types continues. The whole thing is made from amazingly executed blown glass and I find myself drawn to this piece. I’m intrigued by the pseudo-historical nature of the anthropomorphised bucks on the side of the jar. View a close-up of the head here, and the label here.
A side note - this piece is in the museum’s “glass room”, an embarrassingly tight U-turn of a space that holds about 300% of the work that it should, and is almost impossible to feel comfortable in. It seems almost designed to create museum traffic jams and docent anxiety. You simply cannot manage to spend any time, or get any variety of perspective on the work in this room, including this piece.
above - anonymous, detail from Original tattoo designs - It was a real pleasure to come across this 19th century Freemasonry oriented tattoo flash in the de Young. It was in a hallway teaser show of American folk art. The history of tattooing in European and American culture is an area that really, really needs some serious scholarly attention, and it’s nice to see that important documents like this are working their way into museum collections. You can see the whole sheet here and the label here.
above - Don Ed Hardy - Johnny Dishoner - I really only shot this piece to illustrate a point. I’m somewhat mystified about the elevation of tattoo flash to fine art, but I’m really surprised that neither of the above pieces is described as “flash” or “tattoo flash”. I don’t want to nitpick, but that is the widely known vernacular for that is used to describe these objects. I really feel that by calling them “original designs” (I would doubt that they are original - a lot of flash is just tracings and duplications of popular designs) as the top piece does, or by not describing the Don Ed Hardy piece as an example of flash somewhat dumbs down the presentation. You can see the label for this piece here.
Afterthought
After re-reading the post above, I can’t help but feel that there’s something about the bumbling at the de Young that makes me “conspiratorially minded”. Could there be some sort of plot to create a museum that can’t seem to get its shit straight? More likely, there’s an internal corporate culture that somehow tolerates what I see as numerous failures to handle what is really an excellent collection in a competent manner.
