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Given the mundane ubiquity of camera images today, it's hard even to imagine a time when seeing a picture was a special event. That time unraveled only about 150 years ago-my grandparents' parents probably knew the experience-but the specialness of pictures was characteristic of life for millennia prior to Daguerre, Kodak, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Microsoft and all the other modern purveyors of pictorial imagery.
Once, pictures were special just on account of their being pictures. Now, pictures have to be made special, or they'll simply get lost in the traffic.
"Public Information: Desire, Disaster, Document" is an unusually beguiling exhibition of contemporary art that often begins with common camera pictures you wouldn't look at twice but, through artists' interventions, are made oddly special again. Today, the very ordinariness of pictures is what surreptitiously gets them under your skin and into your head, where they can unconsciously shape the ways you think, feel and believe. If the sneakiness of that process makes you uncomfortable-well, this show won't offer solace, but it will open your eyes, mind and heart.
The show inaugurates the handsome and capacious new home of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It's triply suited to that momentous event.
First, SFMOMA's respected department of photography was joined in the 1980s by a department of media arts that, in the often hidebound world of museums, remains a curatorial rarity. Second, the show encompasses all the museum's departments, including painting and sculpture, which underscores how so much art does not fit easily into institutional categories. Finally, works by eight of the 15 artists displayed in "Public Information" are from SFMOMA's own collection, appropriately demonstrating a long-term institutional commitment to artistic ideas explored in the transient form of a temporary exhibition.
In addition to such permanent collection works as videotapes by Larry Clark and Martha Rosler and a James Coleman multimedia installation, SFMOMA is also hosting the premiere of an extraordinary new piece by Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It's the Paris-based artist's first multiscreen environment designed for a museum.
This show is not the first to tackle its evanescent subject. Two shows mounted in Los Angeles about a half-dozen years ago rank as its most important American predecessors: "Photography and Art: Interactions Since 1946," organized...