Keyan Bowes

Today was a bright day by the Bay, after a series of rainstorms, and we decided to celebrate by driving over to Sausalito. We thought we might see Bill Dan, the rock-balancing performance artist, who's often there on weekends. (He was, but more of that another time.)

We had the perfect Sausalito afternoon - we stopped to watch the rock-balancing, strolled over to Spinnaker for coffee and a snack, we wandered back looking at the bay. A sea-lion arfed on a jetty, and a harbor seal and a few Western Grebes swam near the shore. A flock of pelicans landed in perfect formation.

We were heading back toward the car when I saw a large sign that hadn't been there the last time I visited Sausalito. Daniel Merriam, it said. Bubble Street.

"Daniel Merriam!" I said, and went in. It was like magic.

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Last September, someone had posted this picture on a Facebook page, with no background or explanation. It grabbed me so much that I downloaded it onto my hard drive. Who, I wondered, was the artist? For some reason, I expected it to be someone in Russia or Eastern Europe.



But it wasn't. With some help from Google, I discovered Daniel Merriam and his website. (I also discovered that searching Google Images for "Daniel Merriam" yielded a page of gorgeous thumbnails. A few were available for sale, but they weren't cheap. I spent an hour or two or three browsing through them.)

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Bubble Street is his new gallery. As I wandered around, admiring the art, the manager told us that the artist was there, right outside.

"Does he live around here?" I asked.

"Upstairs," she said with a smile.

They had a calendar and a couple of books for sale, together with the prints. We bought the calendar and a book, and she asked if we'd like him to sign them. Of course we would, but should we disturb him? She gave him a call, and he came right down I was impressed, especially considering he's a new dad. His twins came home from hospital - yesterday.

He wrote a couple of thoughtful personalized inscriptions. I was delighted.

Serendipity.

"I keep forgetting the name," said J as we headed to the Chihuly exhibition at the De Young museum, "and thinking Cthulhu."

For the rest of the afternoon, we kept interpreting the exhibition - which was spectacular - through an eldritch lens. I was already familiar with Chihuly's bulbous and tendrilly chandeliers and sculptures. But this was even better. The huge organic shapes were perfectly Lovecraftian, if Cthulhu and his colleagues were represented in brilliantly colored glass.


I thought it was just us, but it's not: Googling Cthulhu Chihuly got me over 500 hits.

In other Chihuly-related news: Kenneth Baker, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, declared that Chihuly's work is Not Art, and used it to swipe at John Buchanan of the De Young Museum. Aside from the art-politics angle, Baker's objection was that the exhibition is intellectually empty, and Chihuly's work is not art because it contains no linkages to the work of other major artists: "The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property."

Well, maybe. The history of art is also the history of eminent critics reviling works that made statements they failed to understand, perhaps precisely because they reflected a discontinuity in artistic tradition. Perhaps Baker's critique is an indicator that Chihuly's work has arrived, not only as a spectacle, but as art. If Baker is eminent enough to count.

At the time I wrote this (3 Aug 08) there were nearly 130 comments, most of them disagreeing with Baker. He followed it with another article, defending his criticism. That got a similar number of comments.

(And maybe he's trying to trace the wrong linkages, anyway. Maybe he should think in terms of Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and look for references to contemporary culture and imagery instead of sterile arguments about art vs craft - which was the excessively tired direction some of the discussion eventually took.)