Dale Chihuly, Tumbleweed

There's a delightful exhibit of works by Dale Chihuly at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.  Abounding with bright colors and exotic shapes, the collection of large scale glass sculpture is just right for the Christmas season ($20 per adult admission). You will ideally arrive on a chilly, gray afternoon, warm yourself strolling through the exhibit's five linked galleries and then join your best friend for a glass of wine in the restaurant.  After these amusements I recommend an extended visit to the Asian, ancient, and 20th Century galleries for real aesthetic nourishment.

Ken Baker, the San Francisco Chronicle art critic, wrote a devastating review of a very similar Chihuly exhibit at the deYoung in 2008.  Below I have excerpted the Baker critiques which demonstrate how a visit will prepare you for the annual celebration-of-excess soon upon us.

Admirers of empty virtuosity may thrill to "Chihuly at the de Young," the de Young Museum's celebration of contemporary glass master Dale Chihuly. Chihuly's presentation at the de Young consists of ensembles of works in blown glass, so theatrically lighted that they make a visitor feel like a walk-on performer in some costly, unnamed spectacle. Perhaps dreamy color, glossy surfaces and flamboyant design - the signal qualities of Chihuly's work - should be enough. But in a culture where only intellectual content still distinguishes art from knickknacks, they are not. The skeptical visitor to "Chihuly at the de Young," starting in the second of its 11 rooms, gets the queasy sense that here the gift shop inevitably barnacled to such exhibitions has finally engulfed its host. The earliest of Chihuly's installations, from 1972, and one of the latest, "Mille Fiori" (2008), look like surrealistic passages in a forest fit for Gump's.

More party than arty.  But while out of place for mid-summer 2008,  Chihuly is well-matched for the Winter solstice 2012.  Your dreams will be full of sugar-plums.