Plink These Links: “Pollock Matters” Review, Greenaway’s “Nightwatching” Movie, Peter Max’s “Summer of Love”

It must be the late-summer silly season:
I admire contrarians, being one myself, but Boston Globe critic Ken Johnson really goes out on a limb by appearing to endorse the controversial Matter Pollocks: “If the two dozen small paintings discovered by Alex Matter five years ago in his deceased parents’ storage locker are not by Jackson Pollock, then I’d like to congratulate whoever did make them….They are beautiful little pictures. If they are not by the master, they are expert imitations in miniature.”
Remember how British filmmaker Peter Greenaway transformed Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” at the Rijksmuseum into a sound-and-light show? Not content to stop there, he has developed his “Nightwatching” installation into a movie. Reuters reports: “With plenty of swearing, nudity and bawdy behavior, the film tries to demystify the character of Rembrandt.” I think I might prefer Walter Liedtke’s Rembrandt.
Remember when I wondered if some “curatorial attempt at quality judgment’ was behind the Whitney’s neglect of psychedelic poster master Peter Max in its bummer “Summer of Love” show? With its just-opened Peter Max and the Summer of Love, San Francisco’s de Young museum shows no such qualms.
(In case you were wondering, the above photo of the piano plinker is my Dad, entertaining the troops in World War II. Who needed Bob Hope?)