We spent the weekend in Joshua Tree. I had never been there but I look forward to returning. I love the desert. We stayed at the Joshua Tree Inn in Room #8, which was where musician Gram Parsons died in 1973 at age 26. If his ghost is still there, he was quite well-behaved.
So we are getting coffee Saturday morning and we bump into an artist from LA – a good friend. The artist and spouse are in town for a wedding. We gossip, lots of art gallery closings, plenty to gossip about. We took it easy and went to a BBQ for a friend’s birthday, they rented a cool house on a dirt road and bough the Manny PacMan fight on pay preview. I was kind of freaked out because the Brit that Manny was fighting looked… well, he kinda looked like me. And in case you didn’t hear, there was a second round knockout that brutal. And I was for PacMan but all of a sudden it looked – just a little – i t looked like me laid out on the ring, gasping for air, out cold. The party was a good time. I don’t bet on the fights anymore, and it is much more enjoyable, as long as I am not the one getting beaten.
We went to the Palm Springs museum on the way home. I have to confess that I have never been to this place and was quite impressed. They have a decent collection and had a good Wayne Thiebaud survey up. One thing they had … they had Latin American art – Tamayo, Matta, etc. – with pre-Colombian pottery interspersed. At first it struck me as cool that they were avoiding the canon, but then I thought… well when they had the John Chamberlain Sculpture, why not have a european suit of armor form the 14th century? So I was ambivalent to the “ghetto” possibilities of this curation.
And of course, we bump into another artist form LA and gab about the goings on… funny. The Palm Springs museum, though, was a LONG visit, it is full of art. Some of it may not be the pinnacle of avant garde, but when you have Frank Sinatra as one of your museum’s benefactors, you can have some Western landscapes, some glass sculptures and an array of cacti in your sculpture garden and let the art world know “I did it my way!”
