SFMoMA

The current exhibits are all wonderful. Olafur Eliasson's "Take Your Time" and "See Yourself Seeing" were so much cooler than I thought they'd be - and I don't just mean the frozen car exhibit, in which a temperature of 11 degrees keeps the car under ice. Visitors have the option of wrapping up in a grey fleece blanket to view the piece. Seems to undermine the message (something about fossil fuels) that extra energy is being expended to maintain that frigid temperature. So many of his installations require manipulation of temperature, and I think they're recycling the water that is necessary to do so. So, the museum smelled musty. As a member, I was tempted to complain, saying something like, "This week the city will be crawling with the world's technoscenti in town for Oracle Open World and so many of them will come to the SFMoMA. How embarrassing that it smells like rank car air conditioner..." Hoping the exhibits overshadow the smell. Particularly charming was the space in front of the elevators on the 4th floor. Eliasson had replaced the light bulbs with some that made it seem like visitors are moving about in a black and white movie. It was so very cool and it brought funny little tears to my eyes.

The Picturing Modernity photography gallery has all new photos, and as RoRo and Karl pointed out, is now on the 3rd floor (a detail that escaped me in my See How It Is). There's a Cindy Sherman self-portrait (oh, wait, that was redundant). A whole wall is dedicated to self-portraits, in fact. There's a spectacular Stieglitz nude - Georgia O'Keefe! And there are some tintypes and cyanotypes now. One of E.J. Bellocq's defaced (literally) portraits of Storyville prostitutes caught my attention - the story surrounding them is that Lee Friedlander found these portraits in a piece of furniture after Bellocq died. No one knows who defaced the portraits - perhaps his brother (a priest), perhaps a lover, perhaps one of the subjects. Of course I'm linking this inspiration for the 1978 film Pretty Baby to Joaquín Buitrago of CRG's Nadie me verá llorar.