Museum Again Sparkles With Superficiality

Is it possible to review an exhibition without ever having seen it? In the case of the San Diego Museum of Art’s current show, “Reflections of Elegance: Cartier Jewels from the Lindemann Collection,” the quality of the show itself is less at issue than the flawed direction it indicates in the museum’s programming. This direction deserves comment, even if the show does not.

Although the museum has launched an aggressive campaign to attract children and families in recent years, through shows focusing on icons of popular culture such as the Muppets, Babar and Dr. Seuss, it also has catered to rarefied, elite tastes by hosting shows lauding the hollow values of wealth, opulence and celebrity. Cartier Jewels and Faberge Eggs are but the latest examples; Rothschild wine labels and Cecil Beaton photographs are others.

Only sporadic and inconsistent efforts have been made to cover the vast territory of art that lies between these two extremes, between the fantasies of children and those of wealthy patrons. The museum’s “Cultural Currents” show, its hosting of the “Black Sun” exhibition of Japanese photography and its solo show of local artist Li Huai were exciting, though anomalous.

As 1989 draws to a close, the museum once again sparkles with superficiality. Its concurrent shows of jewel-encrusted eggs and jewel-encrusted clocks celebrate glamour over substance and ask nothing of their audience but their benumbed, envious eye. Having far less sex appeal--and therefore less crowd appeal--art of substance, art that engages its viewers in formal, intellectual and philosophical questions can hardly compete for the precious few slots on the museum’s schedule of exhibitions.

The museum does offer the community an ongoing resource for such stimulation in the form of its permanent collection, which spans centuries and continents. Its curatorial staff should be a living resource for the same wealth of ideas and possibilities through its active interpretation of the collection and its organization of changing exhibitions. Last year’s Toulouse-Lautrec show examined one of the museum’s major holdings with elegance and breadth, but two other efforts to shed light on the museum’s collection--”More Than Meets the Eye” and “The Walbridge Legacy”--were dismal failures.

Local and state funding agencies have criticized the museum for not using its curatorial staff to its capacity. Instead of organizing the bulk of the museum’s shows in-house, the museum has long favored renting traveling shows initiated by other institutions.

In 1989, only three shows out of eight (the Artists Guild Annual Juried Exhibition, Li Huai and Joaquin Sorolla) were curated within the museum. Of the three, the Artists Guild show featured a guest juror and the Sorolla show was organized jointly by SDMA and the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia.

The museum’s schedule for 1990 perpetuates this benign neglect, offering scant outlets for the creativity and scholarship expected of museum curators. The curatorial staff snoozes through the first six months of the year with the annual Artists Guild show, juried by a Los Angeles gallery owner, and a show of art by local schoolchildren selected by the museum’s education department.

Not until June does the museum snap alive with an exhibition of any stature--a survey of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and ideas, to include a full-scale “Usonian Automatic House.” The show was organized by the Scottsdale Arts Center Assn. and the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation.

Three additional shows round out the year’s schedule: “Prints of the Eighties,” organized by the Bank of America Corporation Art Collection; an as-yet-unnamed Art Nouveau exhibition organized by the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami, and the museum’s sole curatorial venture of the year, an exhibition of Ch’ing Dynasty court robes from the permanent collection, organized by SDMA’s curator of Asian art, Sung, Yu.

Another year gone by, then, with no home-grown shows by Martin Petersen, curator of American art; Mary Stofflet, curator of modern and contemporary art, or Nora Desloge, curator of European art. Another year of our museum spending $4 million to host the talents of other museums’ curators.

Last year the city of San Diego’s Commission for Arts and Culture pointed out this deficiency when the museum made its annual request for transient occupancy tax funds. The museum cited in its defense that it receives “an embarrassingly low fraction of its operating budget (11%) from the city as compared to museums nationally.”

The city’s policy of funding arts institutions is under review and could, indeed, use adjusting, but other local museums, notably the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, manage to find and fund a provocative array of shows under the same system.

As the city’s largest and most visible art museum, the San Diego Museum of Art has a responsibility not just to titillate the public with dazzling gems and to humor it with cartoon characters, but to prompt a deeper understanding of life through art. Curators are not just caretakers of a collection; they have the potential to be cultural guides, leaders even, if given the freedom and support.

The end of the year is a time to reflect on past successes and inadequacies, and to shape plans for the future. The San Diego Museum of Art might consider as new year’s resolutions a break from this curatorial malaise, a flaunting of the talents it claims to boast on staff and a commitment to added breadth and depth in its exhibition programming.