Critic as Curator?

Can someone please tell me what Cathy Curtis is trying to say in her review of the UC Irvine Art Gallery show (“More Lukewarm Than ‘Hotbed,’ ” Nov. 29)? Most of the time her myopic and idiosyncratic view of the contemporary art scene is pretty bluntly, if reductively, stated in her writing. But this time there are so many crossed lines that I have a sense there must be a hidden message.

What comes through mostly is that she feels she could have done a better job curating such a show than its curator, Dickran Tashjian, did. Of course, as she herself acknowledges, he worked under constraints: “He had six months to assemble a show that easily could have been a multiyear project.” But that doesn’t prevent Curtis from telling us how she would have done it. Nor from a gratuitous suggestion that Tashjian has a “personal stake” in this show, which somehow compromised his effectiveness in mounting it.

In fact the only “stake” in it he had was the normal wish of a member of an academic and artistic community to present the achievements of his institution in the best manner possible. As a member of the UC Irvine faculty (but not in the art field), I am naturally upset when the serious work of a colleague is thus publicly impugned. Regarding the merits of the show itself or its success in fulfilling its aims, I will leave judgment to those who have seen it. I think it will, for most people, be quite different from Curtis’.

ALEXANDER GELLEY

Irvine