It’s Art, but Is It Good? : Worthy Exhibitions--Innovative Explorations of Ideas--Require Research Driven by Intellectual Curiosity

This column comes to you courtesy of a courtly Laguna Art Museum trustee who calls from time to time to put in a good word for his institution. Responding to my recent lukewarm review of the museum’s current roster of shows, he diplomatically proposed that I discuss my “criteria for a successful exhibition,” citing specific examples in Orange County.

Readers--particularly those who suspect that critical writing is utterly capricious--might be relieved to learn that reviewers have tidy mental checklists of good-show criteria. But the reality is more complex.

In a general sense, of course, I do have criteria. I’m looking for a creative, intelligent and clearly presented exploration of ideas--a distinctive blend of authority (command of the subject) and innovation (a new way of thinking about it).

Ideas about what? Well, about virtually anything. In an art museum, the subject could be a major or a minor artist, a specific style or historical period, a new trend or a link between art-making and pop culture.

One obvious criterion for a good show is the quality of the art itself. But there have been good shows of “bad” art (amateur pieces, discredited styles) and exhibitions of good art that lacked focus or tried to force works into a rigid mold that failed to illuminate them.

The key point is that successful exhibitions don’t occur in a vacuum. They depend on the institution’s commitment to hiring well-trained, energetic, intellectually curious curators and giving them the resources and the freedom to do their jobs. Money doesn’t hurt--though intelligent shows have been done on the cheap--but it cannot substitute for brains, creativity and hard work.

Good exhibitions, after all, are the result of months or years of planning. Objects may need to be tracked down in myriad public and private collections. Historical shows involve time-consuming research and interpretation (judgments of quality, evaluation of outside influences). Contemporary shows demand a curatorial point of view about the meaning and relevance of the work selected. The bulk of a curator’s research goes into the catalog--a vital reference source long after the show is dismantled.

A single person cannot realistically produce more than one such show every year or two. But they are the benchmarks against which an institution is judged.

There was a time, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, when this county had museum shows that art-savvy Los Angelenos drove down to see. That was no fluke; it was the direct result of the interests of particular curators and the supportive yet hands-off policy of trustees.

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At the Laguna Art Museum, one of the best shows of the past decade was a pet project of former director and curator Charles Desmarais, a specialist in photography who is now director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati.

Before the 1992 showing of “Proof: Los Angeles Art and the Photograph, 1960-1980,” nobody had investigated the way skeptical attitudes of the ‘60s, nontraditional working methods and mass culture influenced Los Angeles artists to emphasize the unreliability of photographic imagery. Nearly 100 works by 45 artists of note incorporated fantasy, humor, sensuality, satire and deadpan wit.

Another show, organized by guest curator Susan Landauer during Desmarais’ tenure, was last year’s “The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism.” It presented a compelling group of works in a fresh way--not as spinoffs of a New York style but as the products of hard-won personal vision.

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During the late 1980s, Newport Harbor Art Museum chief curator Paul Schimmel tackled three big research projects that shed new light on key shifts of focus among New York painters in the 1940s and ‘50s, the period when American art first became a world player. He also produced a definitive survey of the art of Chris Burden, the onetime UC Irvine art student whose flamboyantly theatrical early work deals with issues of power and freedom.

With such exhibitions, Schimmel not only made his own reputation (in 1990 he became chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles) but also temporarily transformed his museum from a low-profile regional enclave for contemporary art to what my colleague Christopher Knight called “one of the most adventuresome small museums in the county.”

To be sure, an exhibition needn’t be revelatory on a grand scale to be successful. But strong shows of modest size or ambition also require a skilled curatorial hand. Traveling exhibitions from nationally prominent museums, selected by local curators, have helped fill this gap.

In recent years, Laguna Art Museum exhibitions on early 20th century painters August Gay and Augustus Vincent Tack and Abstract Expressionist William Corbett--all organized by other institutions--evoked the milieus and mind-sets of second-tier artists whose work retains a visual appeal.

Although the resources (staffing, budget, square footage) of Orange County museums don’t match those of their big-city cousins, local patrons could gain inspiration from some of the shows mounted by major institutions.

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Right now, for example, there are two superb exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. One is an intensively documented survey of six decades of photomontages and other work by German artist Hannah Hoch, organized by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the other presents drawings, furniture and mock-ups of rooms designed by turn-of-the-century Scottish architect Charles Rennie Macintosh. Copious background information and skillful exhibition design allow you to immerse yourself in the visual and cultural worlds of Hoch and Macintosh.

Neither show has a single piece that would qualify as a “treasure,” in the overworked sense of a fabulously valuable or famous object, yet both present significant, visually captivating work with intelligence and skill.