Dale Chihuly at the de Young

Dale Chihuly’s work is currently on view at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, and I’m beginning this blog with a few thoughts on the exhibition because so many visitors to our COLD+HOT 2008 show have asked about his work and about Kenneth Baker's review in the San Francisco Chronicle.

I adore the theatricality of Chihuly’s installation at the de Young. It is exuberant, larger than life, and visually electric. His choices of color and reflective surface amplify the glass, create a sense of sculptural presence, invite lingering, and allow the viewer to circle and reframe each piece from multiple vantage points.

The question I am most often asked, however, is whether this is fine art or decoration—especially in light of Baker’s stature as a serious critic in the San Francisco art community and his skepticism toward what he calls “empty virtuosity.” My instinct is to defend Chihuly as a fine artist and to draw clear distinctions between fine and decorative art, yet curators and museums in New York, Los Angeles, and Paris have already done a far more nuanced job of dissolving those boundaries in their exhibitions devoted to design and the decorative arts. So perhaps the more interesting question is not, “Which category does Chihuly belong to?” but, “Does this distinction matter to anyone encountering the work?”

If we accept that the history of fine art grows from early attempts to record events, generate symbols, and carry belief systems—if we see fine art as the exchange of ideas in visual form—then what, exactly, about Chihuly’s work qualifies as fine art? A better counter-question might be: what about it does not? As in his earlier installations, Chihuly’s decision to work at an extravagant scale eclipses our usual conception of glass sculpture and compels us to reconsider glass’s cultural role. The cacophony of color and the sheer physical ambition of the work give it a visual gravity that recalls Donald Judd’s rigor and insistence on form. Judd prompted viewers to ask, “What is this?”; Chihuly, in a different idiom, forces us to bring every memory of glass—every vase, bowl, and decorative object we have known—into the room and confront that same question again. These are blown-glass sculptures that occupy space, command attention, demonstrate extraordinary technical control, and then challenge us to admit them into the tightly policed arena of fine art.

I do not own a Chihuly piece; it does not quite sit within my personal aesthetic—at least not yet. But I do love glass sculpture. I love sculpture of many kinds: Calder, Giacometti, Kapoor, Libenský, Rodin. The sensational, almost operatic quality of Chihuly’s work raises my more formal, restrained instincts to skepticism, even as the visual part of me revels in the freshness, bravado, and sheer sensorial impact of the de Young show. After all, isn’t part of art’s appeal its novelty? Baker’s critique brings to mind the controversy around I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid at the Louvre and the initial fuss over Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao—projects now widely admired but once accused of inappropriateness or excess.

For glass sculptors, Chihuly’s prominence is profoundly validating. His work relocates glass from the margins of “craft” into the center of contemporary discourse, using scale, light, and spatial occupation to challenge traditional expectations and to respond to a cultural appetite for “bigger” and “more.” Glass is among the most demanding sculptural materials: the artist must either carve it cold or work it hot at temperatures above 2000°F, coaxing form from a liquid that only briefly consents to be shaped. Its mercurial nature and intimate relationship with light keep it a material of wonder. Its plasticity lets it assume any contour the artist can imagine. Around this medium, a vibrant culture has formed—artists, collectors, and institutions—generating camaraderie, serious patronage, and a rising consensus that glass is a fully fledged fine art medium, no longer the overlooked younger sibling of sculpture.

Thanks to Chihuly, the American studio glass movement has moved far beyond the craft studio, into major institutions with robust public support and international reach. We no longer dismiss glass objects as mere knick-knacks; our understanding of decoration and design is enriched by a medium with ancient roots that has been pulled from the archives and thrust onto the front lines of 21st-century art-making. Thanks to Baker, the conversation about where glass sculpture sits within the fine art hierarchy remains active and provocative. Together, Chihuly’s spectacle and Baker’s skepticism demonstrate the power of visibility—and of art that evolves from humble material origins into a phenomenon of global attention.