Art: Framed

By Erika Yowell

I want to like the exhibit on view at the Las Vegas Art Museum. I'm tired of hearing how bereft of meaningful culture this city is, how third-rate its attempts at becoming highbrow are. And I certainly don't want to sound like yet another pompous naysayer who drones on and on and endlessly on about these topics in tabloid entertainment publications.

It's boldly touted as Botero on the signage outside the building, but the full title of the current LVAM show is actually Fernando Botero Posters: The Evolution of a Master. It's an exhibit of framed posters by the world-renowned Colombian artist famous for rendering pear-shaped people and jovially ripping off old masters. When I say posters, I mean the kind you can buy for $10 at a museum gift shop. These $10 posters are hanging in a museum. You have to pay $5 to see these posters.

This is just the sort of thing that makes the Vegas populace nuts. "Posters?!" they'll exclaim from their Summerlin enclaves. "Back home in [Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Detroit, Houston], our museums show actual paintings."

Now, the idea behind the exhibit is interesting enough. Organized by the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, Calif., Fernando Botero Posters presents the tangible manifestation of one man's passion. That man would be a Mr. Enrique Michelsen, a businessman and collector who acquired his first Botero poster as a gift in 1977. So charmed was he, Michelsen began a quest to collect a poster from every Fernando Botero exhibit around the world and throughout the artist's career. His collection, as the exhibit literature correctly states, serves as an excellent guide to Botero's oeuvre, which appears to have evolved very subtly over the last four decades.

LVAM Art Education Coordinator Marleen Kovacs speaks of the Botero exhibit as the museum's initial stab at proactively appealing to the Las Vegas area's Latino community. There's a companion exhibit curated by LVAM curator-at-large James Mann called Latin American Art NOW! on view in the museum's side galleries. While not the headline show, the exhibit does feature real paintings. It also features wall panels bearing Mann's gleefully self-important, vaguely whack analysis. A great example appears on the wall text next to Salvadoran artist César Menéndez' fantasy-figural paintings: "Armature machinery of an indeterminate tubular nature insinuates itself within two of these paintings, and in one case it disgorges fish."

Now, that's art.