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lies like truth

Chloe Veltman: how culture will save the world

A Statement of the Obvious

sky.jpegYesterday, as we were standing in the vestibule/store at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art (MoCFA) in downtown San Francisco, the museum’s director, one of its curators and I found ourselves admiring a striking view.

An old Catholic church with its severe grey masonry and red brick, a high-rise apartment block decked out in gleaming aqua colored glass and steel girders and the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s hulking black cube structure looked like three conspiring figures, almost blocking out a jigsaw puzzle-shaped piece of blue sky.

“When I look at this view, I feel like I live in a much bigger metropolis,” said Natasha Boas, the curator. I know what Natasha means. It seems like almost every week, I hear someone remarking upon what a small provincial town we live in. We are often quick to point out that San Francisco is not a patch on New York, Paris or London from a cultural perspective. But then we remember that those cities have populations that number millions of people. San Francisco, by comparison, has just over 800,000. For such a hick burg, we’re disproportionately artsy.

It’s not every city of 800,000 residents that can support not one but two museums — MoCFA and the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design — dedicated to the visual arts branch of crafts, after all.

lies like truth

These days, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between fact and fantasy. As Alan Bennett's doollally headmaster in Forty Years On astutely puts it, "What is truth and what is fable? Where is Ruth and where is Mabel?" It is one of the main tasks of this blog to celebrate the confusion through thinking about art and perhaps, on occasion, attempt to unpick the knot. [Read More...]

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