Today's Houston Chronicle Zest magazine has a profile of Menil curator Franklin Sirmans (the rather brainless cover text "Curator cool: The Menil Collection's Franklin Sirmans has the Houston art scene talking" demonstrates, if we needed further confirmation of it, how dumb this paper really is — or, worse, how dumb it thinks its readers are). But hey, let's start talking: I'd argue that the jury's still out on Sirmans; as I pointed out already, "Lessons from Below: Otabenga Jones and Associates" (on view through Dec. 9) is the kind of trendy curating (organizing, whatever) that's so rampant in the art world it's barely worth mentioning. You know the drill: curators trot out the same hot young artists who are nevertheless too green to be up to the task ("but they were in the Whitney Biennial!") (Also as aforementioned, the show had essentially been done already, and better.) Of interest, however, is Sirman's Neo Hoo-Doo show he's working on for next summer — although the term has already cropped up in recent cultural memory, it hasn't done so in the visual arts, and this is African American social criticism we can really sink our collective teeth into. Also, what with religion's grip on politics in this country starting to splinter, Sirmans could be dead-on with his timing if he forces the audience to examine some hard core superstition. So between Sirman's Hoo-Doo show and the excellent Nauman show currently on view, it looks like the Menil may be getting away from impeccable, elegant, faintly boring monograph shows of dead white Dia males that have filled us all with warm fuzzies of approval all these years. (OK, Nauman's a white Dia male, but elegant and boring his show is not). So go Sirmans, go!
Shake it
