When museums give you a "vacation" instead of making sure you "have to work"

I just read the Tribune's review of the new Toulouse-Lautrec show. According to their art critic Alan G. Artner, the exhibition's curators display a faddish obsession with the "cafes, dance halls, cabarets and brothels" that Lautrec depicted. For example, his brothel paintings are examined in the context of brothels, when in fact they are "simply some of his greatest works in any medium" and could have been "exhibited as such."

Even though the show includes works by contemporaries Renoir and Degas and trace Lautrec's influence on Picasso and Van Gogh, these artists' works are unfortunately "presented for documentary instead of artistic value." All this social and material context comes at the expense of "formal analysis" and something called "the process that turned his documents into art."

The show emphasizes "popular culture," for example showing how Lautrec's commercial poster for the Moulin Rouge helped make the nightclub famous, and how that in turn transformed Lautrec's own career. In contrast to last year's Seurat exhibition, where the audience was "told it would have to work," this exhibition "promises a vacation of touristic, voyeuristic fun."

By the way, the Tribune wasn't the only big-city daily newspaper to endorse Bush in '04 - there were lots of others, such as the Dallas Morning News, the Indianapolis Star, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.