SFMOMA

Looking at the Permanent Collection (the Fisher's, that is) it's plain to see that there are lots and lots of painter's but there are only a very few people who never made bad paintings--Morandi, Rosenquist, Agnes Martin. Picasso made lots of bad paintings, more bad paintings than good ones, but his early work was very good and in it you can see how great an artist he'd become.

The difficulty with an artist like Bruce Conner is that when you make art you want to make it as good as it can be. I feel none of that in the art of Bruce Conner; it's not art he's making, it's art wanting not to be art, purposely, and making art out of that energy, of not wanting to make art but making something like it anyway. Art like this seems a sadness perpetuated on me.

Now to art that makes me happy: Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Paul Klee (but in a strange political way, seeing what he was seeing, that the Nazi's are coming), and the late deKooning. A late deKooning's the graphic equivalent of Robert Frost saying that a poem should, "begin in delight and end in wisdom," and deKooning himself chooses to end in delight. 

The building itself is better than it was, though I liked it as it was. It's possible now to have a walk through the art as if you're in a big unified field rather than being in a series of boxes. There's more of the outside in it now too.