SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT >>>

I recently posted an article on this blog called "Give glass a rest." It was subtitled "Dale Chihuly is bigger than you'll ever be." I don't make up the titles. There's a guy they keep locked in the basement of Weekly Volcano World Headquarters who does nothing but write headlines. Blame that guy.

I started the article with, "Enough with the glass art already," and went on to berate glass art in general and Dale Chihuly in particular. Believe it or not I don't despise all glass art. I even admire some of Chihuly's stuff. There have been and continue to be spectacular glass art shows at the Museum of Glass and Traver Gallery. Tacoma is lucky to have these institutions.

I particularly liked Karen LaMonte's stunning empty dresses at MOG - flowing glass gowns with the imprint of the figure, the smallest details of the figure visible inside the empty dresses but no body there. These were hauntingly beautiful sculptures in glass.

I was blown away by William Morris' "Object and the Animal" show from 2005. Few exhibitions of art of any genre have been so impressive. (I was told by a spokesperson from his studio that he has retired but you can still see his work online at http://www.wmorris.com/ and he is still represented by the Foster White Galleries in Seattle.)

And I was both highly entertained and impressed by Einar and Jamex de la Torres' shows at both MOG and Traver. These Mexican-American brothers are talented, irreverent, funny and macabre. Their sculptures are loaded with sex and politics. In my review of their show at Traver in 2008 I called them "the bastard twin sons of Andy Warhol and Frida Kahlo." How could you not want to see art that inspired a statement like that?

But the thing about glass art is that most of it is predictable and repetitious and essentially decorative craft, not art. I know some people will say that's a snobbish attitude. So be it. I'm an art critic; I'm supposed to be a snob.

The craft of glass is very much like the craft of pottery, just a different media. I remember once in another lifetime when I was reviewing a faculty art exhibit I dismissed the few ceramics works in the show with a take-off on a famous quote from Gertrude Stein: a pot is a pot is a pot. I caught hell for that, but I stood by it then and still do today. Like most pottery, most glass art consists of vessels and plates and other decorative knick-knacks to be displayed on a shelf at home. Sometimes the people who make them make them really, really big and think that makes it art. That ain't art, my friend. Art aspires to something greater. Art triggers emotion and stimulates thought. Pretty s just a tiny part of it.