Art, art, art.

I went to the DeYoung Museum yesterday, just in time to see two exhibits on their last day. I won't tell you how wonderful they were, or that you have to go, since that would be cruel. But I will tell you, that the more I spend time in that museum, the more I like it as a museum. I liked the outside (except the tower), since they put the copper cladding on it. I really love the garden spaces. But the inside struck me as a little weird at first. Not the individual galleries, which are fine, but the overall layout. It seemed a little haphazard, and it still does. What is different is how that haphazardness has grown on me. I like the fact that the whole thing feels a little bit like a demented labyrinth, with strange ways to get from one gallery to the next, and some odd ways of veering from the chronological.

I do have to wonder, however, how much longer it will still make sense to have the art from Oceania and Africa? I realize that there is not enough to make a separate museum, like they did with the Asian, but the DeYoung is supposed to be a museum of American Art, or at least that is the focus on the Western stuff. The European art is at the Legion. So, what is with the orphaned of the non-Western world that have (I dare say, beautiful) homes at the de Young?