THE VOLCANO'S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC WEIGHS IN >>>

Here's the opening, slightly edited, of my Visual Edge for this week (see June 9 Weekly Volcano):

"Tacoma Art Museum tries to mount exhibitions that range from the traditional and historic to today's most revolutionary and idiosyncratic art. ... Just when I think they're on the verge of selling out ­ - oh god, another Chihuly, and this right after the blockbuster Norman Rockwell show - they do something gutsy like bringing in the highly controversial Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture."

While I was writing that my mind wandered to rock stars and visual artists. I decided that Norman Rockwell was to visual art what Frank Sinatra was to music in the '50s and early '60s, except that the whole Rat Pack scene was pretty damn risqué for the times, and also quite sexist. I don't associate Norman Rockwell with babes and boobs. But minus the babes and boobs Rockwell's talent and appeal was much like that of Sinatra. Ol' Blue Eyes was the king before Elvis, and Rockwell was king of a different kind of art, appealing to mass audiences at the same time Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were kings of the visual art elite (they were the John Coltrane of visual art, or maybe you could think of them as the Rolling Stones and the Beatles way ahead of their time).

So I got to wondering. If Rockwell was Frank Sinatra, who would Dale Chihuly be? I think he's Neil Diamond. Specifically the Neil Diamond of his heyday in the mid '80s - glitzy and smooth with huge appeal. Other rock stars who had the same kind of appeal were Tom Jones and the late-career Elvis Presley before Vegas and all those second-rate movies. (I would not dare compare any of these with the young Elvis from the Sun Records days. That Elvis was a giant, and the only painters who could be compared with him were Picasso and the afore-mentioned Pollock and de Kooning.)

One other big difference, which could shoot my hypothesis all to hell, is that Elvis and Tom Jones and Neil Diamond all had huge sex appeal. There was never anything sexy about Norman Rockwell. I associate him more with Sunday school and 4H clubs, and I can't imagine women chasing after him and tearing at his clothes. Chihuly, on the other hand, may have a kind of sex appeal, what with the eye patch.

After playing around with those ideas for a while I asked myself what visual artists could compare with Neil Young, and I thought of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. And then I began to search my mind for the art equivalent of Green Day and Eddie Vedder, and that's when my mind began to explode. Green Day? Maybe the German artist Anselm Keifer with all his rough, gritty and explosive paintings. But Vedder, he's a tough one. As contemporary and sometimes biting and unconventional as he can be, there's something classical and - dare I say it - sweet about him, and maybe the visual art equivalent would be someone like the great Edward Hopper or maybe Roy Lichtenstein.

So anyway, the Norman Rockwell show has gone away. It was a gigantic success. For a while it was like having Frank Sinatra perform at the Tacoma Dome. And now he's being replaced by Tacoma native and Northwest icon Dale Chihuly. The Chihuly show will probably draw big crowds and lots of oohs and aahs, and I will probably reluctantly admire some of his work just as I reluctantly admire Neil Diamond - but don't tell anybody.