Best arts of 2011
In chronological order of their opening, these are the nine California museum shows, plus one show that could have been, that I enjoyed most in 2011. Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman, San Diego Museum of Art. A concise gem of a show that demonstrated how the British artist’s pictures of women, many of them performers, underscored the theatrical power of Gainsborough’s own dazzling brush.
RA Summer Show
Centred on a forecourt installation by Jeff Koons, this year’s Summer Show eschews the chic, minimalist displays of recent years, with selected galleries packed to the rafters in homage to the traditional “salon hang”.
Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An eye-boggling array of Aztec, Inca and Spanish Colonial art — especially painting — the show is the first to consider the myriad ways in which art represented the indigenous people living under the post-conquest vice-royalties established in Mexico and Peru.
Treasures of Heaven
The medieval passion for relics explored through a treasure trove of “real” sacred objects – including alleged fragments of the Crown of Thorns and True Cross – and the opulent, sometimes erotic, objects created to hold them.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art made me gay! I was shaken to my hetero core by the unbridled originality, brazenness, and riveting vision on display in the Met’s Alexander McQueen show of clothes that became sculpture that turned into art. Dismissing this as “only a fashion show” is like saying Mozart only wrote songs.
Lisa Yuskavage at David Zwirner
Just as I was dismissing Yuskavage’s new candy-colored paintings of young buxom monstrosities as more of her typical calendar-art sci-fi kitsch, my wife whispered to me, “These are all sacrifices.” Though I’m still not a fan, I suddenly reeled from the sight of a painted knife with blood on it beneath a table with a headless female body on top, all of it standing in for the bodies of women and the body of painting.






