San Jose Museum of Art

The San Jose Museum of Art is nicely decorated and furnished museum with many different types of art. I decided to start out by looking at some of the various paintings. There were many different kinds, including traditional oil paintings on canvas as well as ordinary paper. One that stood out in my mind was “Desert Restaurant” by John Register. It’s a painting of the inside of a diner sitting in the middle of an open desert. The picture gives an eerie sense of isolation. One sculpture that I remember was one by Oliver Jackson, which is untitled. The sculpture appears to be a figure of a human squatting down. The sculpture is made out of Steel, Marble, and Crayon. Besides these, there were many other interesting pieces of art in the Museum including the unique bright chandeliers made of blown glass.

I read an article in an old issue of “Art in America” about the lack of interest many young Americans show toward art in recent years. The article went on to explain how museum attendance was down in most museums compared to 20 years ago. Their main reasoning for this was the basic arguments of the advances in other forms of technology such as Television and computers that draw the attention of young ones away from traditional arts such as museums and live plays. The article went on to say that plays have become more for the highly sophisticated and less for the average person. The average person views a live play as any normal television show and doesn’t recognize the culture aspect attached to it. (Art in America, “Fading Culture” 1991, 12-14)

The San Jose Museum of Art held a lot of interesting types of art, but I think I can understand what the article I read in “Art in America” was saying. Art has not changed much over time. Art takes a higher level of appreciation and educational level to be truly understood and enjoyed.