Howdy!

Although it has tons of problems, the New York Times is still a good read, and I especially like how they have figured out how to allow bloggers to use their articles without having them expire. So this post will be understandable for a long time.

Last Friday, Michael Kimmelman reviewed the "latest" and "greatest" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Childe Hassam exhibit.

Now, normally I wouldn't bother commenting on this review, but it just so happens that I know someone who was intimately involved with the exhibition, so unlike a newspaper reporter, I can throw out all question of "integrity." Plus I haven't even seen the exhibit. Fun, eh?!

To start off, I gotta give it to the Times, unlike the newspapers on this side of the border where 700 words is a looooong review, this one clocks in at 1,512 words, although I am not certain they are a good use of newsprint (lucky me, I read it on a screen!).

Mr. Kimmelman states from the get go that he is not a fan of Mr. Hassam's paintings. Fair enough, but I would have liked to know in some more detail as to why. He uses lines like "he of the candied views of patriotic, flag-draped New York during World War 1." And "He stuck doggedly to other cheerful themes of Americana during his long, lucrative career...just as he stuck pretty much to the same ingratiating, occasionally cloying brand of Impressionism decades after Symbolism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism and a slew of other new-isms had come and sometimes gone."

Umm, could this perhaps be jealousy? Just because someone is "popular" doesn't mean that they suck. Toss this sort of stuff into a different cultural medium, and Bruce Springsteen, Walt Disney, Sylvester Stallone, Margaret Mitchell, and Steven Spielberg would be the equivalents of lepers.

Then after bashing Hassam for doing the same type of painting for too long, he does a complete about face and writes "Constancy is usually admirable..." So which is it? Make up yer damn mind!

Mr. Kimmelman then continues (yeah, I sorta figure that this would be considered a "close read") about the prevalence of minor historical figures getting retrospectives. If he picked his nose up off of the keyboard long enough he might realize that "All Picasso! All the Time!!" would quickly get dull. When was the last time he went and reviewed the Met's permanent collection?

Mr. Kimmelman then goes on to talk out of both sides of his mouth, when he talks about how Barbara Weinberg deliberately left out "most of his dubious, stiff late pictures" but Hassam still sucks, and then a paragraph later quoting one of his predecessors at the Times "Hassam, as good an Impressionist as America ever produced... The sparkle of his early work dwindled..." Shouldn't he have gone and written something about how his predecessor was absolutely wrong? According to my way of reading "sparkle" is something good.