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Yesterday afternoon I went downtown to check out the current exhibition at the Austin Museum of Art, "Embracing the Present: The UBS Art Collection," which is, not suprisingly, art from a corporate collection. A lot of household names are represented in the show, including Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and Cindy Sherman, but the pieces from the big names seemed to be lesser works.

As I stood in one gallery, a woman walked in with her two daughters who looked maybe fourteen and eleven. The younger daughter looked at Jean-Michel Basquiat's "Tobacco versus Red Chief" with its wacky colors and childlike scrawlings, and exclaimed "Oh I like that one!"

The mother read the card, and said, "Basquiat... I think there was a movie about him."

I was all, "Yeah, it had David Bowie as Warhol."

I bat about .500 talking to strangers in museums, and this time I was talking out of place. The woman said, "That's right," and acted a little put-off.

The youngest daughter looked at the card, did the math, and said "He lived to be 28. Wait, why he die so young?"

Put in an uneviable position, the woman said, "Well sometimes artists live crazy lives and do crazy things, and it catches up with them..."

Basquiat seemed oddly representative of the pieces on display. It seemed as if the collectors fell victim to the Tulipmania that afflicted the art world in the 1980s with iffy pieces from the likes of David Salle. One photograph, Paradise by Thomas Struth surprised me with its high contrast and lack of detail.

There were a few pieces, I enjoyed. My sentimental favorite was Frank Thiel's Potsdamer Platz. My sister Julia lives near Potsdamer Platz in East Berlin and speaks of it in dismissive tones. This photograph from 1995 shows the place under construction. If you rebuilt Times Square from scratch in the image of the Sony Metreon, it might look like this, so, yeah, yuck.

Afterwards I walked down Congress to check out the show at Arthouse...