If the Seattle Art Museum is waiting for a thumbs-up on its Michelangelo debacle, it’s going to have to write one for itself. Walt Whitman did so under a pseudonym for Leaves of Grass, and his reputation remains unsullied.
The closest thing to favorable are Victoria Ellison’s three paragraphs tacked on to the end of her Calder review.
The decision to turn Michelangelo into a Calder postscript pushes in
the opposite direction of her generous comments. (Whose work got the
illustration? Calder’s.)
(My Michelangelo review here. My Calder here.)
In his fine Calder review, Stephen Cummings reduced his reaction to Michelangelo to the following:
It may go without saying that SAM has a bit of a (deserved) reputation for mounting second rate shows. (Michelangelo certainly qualifies.)
If
SAM has this reputation, it is unearned. At the region’s flagship
museum I’ve never seen an exhibit as overblown and underfed. It’s the
kind of thing John Buchanan used to surround with superlatives when he was fund-raiser-in-chief director of the Portland Art Museum. He has since taken his brass-band personal style to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, causing Kenneth Baker great dismay.
Back to Walt Whitman:
The 1855 publication of Leaves of Grass
was heralded by anonymous reviews printed in New York papers, which
were clearly written by Whitman himself. They accurately described the
break-through nature of his “transcendent and new” work. “An American
bard at last!” trumpeted one self-review. (more)
Anyone caught doing that today would surely share the fate of James Frey. He took a beating for his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, discovered after publication to be partly fictionalized. In response to his critics, Frey commissioned a painting by Ed Ruscha. (Story here):
No story ever happens the way we tell it, but the moral is always correct.
Donald Barthelme, from The Dead Father
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