Exhibition of the week: Chihuly at the De Young

De Young Museum, San Francisco

Through Sept. 28

It’s hard to believe that Dale Chihuly is “only now having his first comprehensive exhibition” at a major American art museum, said David Littlejohn in The Wall Street Journal. Chihuly is one of the most commercially successful artists in the world, specializing in vibrantly colored blown-glass objects “shaped like wonky vases or surrealistic shells or giant cabbage leaves.” Collectors pay handsomely for even the smallest decorative object from Chihuly’s studio, and he has created enormous installations in Las Vegas, Venice, and other cities around the world. But this enormous retrospective at San Francisco’s De Young Museum may not have been his best career move. Seen together, Chihuly’s hallucinatory creations can seem exercises in “pointless, gleaming excess”—okay for a casino or a hotel lobby, but out of place in a fine-art museum.

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Chihuly has been criticized because he no longer personally creates every glass item issued under his name, said Dixie Reid in The Sacramento Bee. But that’s not quite fair. Back in the 1970s, Chihuly lost use of his left eye, and ever since has relied on assistants to create his “wonderfully trippy” objects and environments. "Glass Forest No. 3," last seen in 1972, consists of glass-and-neon baubles “looking ever so much like pastel candy kisses melting skyward.” Reeds, first shown in 1995, embeds thin lavender stems into actual birch logs, while "Mille Fiori" (2008) is an enormous “glass garden” that beguilingly intertwines nature’s creations with the artist’s. There’s not much difference in quality between old and new works, but there is a growing ambition and complexity. Chihuly today operates as a conceptual artist, concentrating primarily on coming up with new ideas.

But conceptual art is supposed to be about ideas, said Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle. Chihuly’s isn’t. “In a culture where only intellectual content still distinguishes art from knickknacks,” Chihuly does little to challenge his viewers, to deepen their appreciation of either art or nature. In fact, most works here are “so theatrically lighted” it’s difficult to study them closely. The point is to awe you—and to convince you to buy a Chihuly bowl or vase on the way out the door. One “gets the queasy sense” that the museum gift shop has swallowed up the actual museum—or at least that the people who run the De Young no longer recognize the difference. Let me be clear: “The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it.”