This is neither worth loving nor hating.

Tonight and tomorrow, you are invited to a symposium. It costs almost nothing except your time, and though it is called Queering the Art Museum, it is not only for those who identify as queer—although the open discussion of sexual difference is a vital part of what needs to happen in museums.

It is about changing the culture of museums so that they no longer defer to the conservatism of a certain segment of the rich and powerful, but serve a broader public interest instead.

Basically, Queering the Art Museum is Occupy Art Museums under another name.

Hide/Seek co-curator Jonathan Katz gave a rousing talk this morning at Sandra Jackson-Dumont's museology class at the University of Washington, Public Engagement in Art. It served as an unofficial rallying cry to open the weekend of events.

"Museum directors are much more concerned about what might scare or offend a trustee than they are about what might scare or offend the public," Katz said. "I take the romantic ideal of museums as an institution for the public to be little more than a fiction at this point."

What Katz found most objectionable after hate group the Catholic League protested Hide/Seek in late 2010 was not the Smithsonian's own censorship of the show, but other museums' accusation that the Smithsonian was cowardly—when many of those institutions had refused to lend artworks to Hide/Seek in the first place.

For instance, Hide/Seek was conceived and titled with this 1948 painting by Pavel Tchelitchew in mind. The painting is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, but MoMA refused to lend it, Katz said.

Here in Seattle, "Locally, [museum] trustees were approached for donations to Hide/Seek and aggressively refused," Katz said.

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Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight has a piece on why art prices—like the $120 million paid at auction for The Scream last week, an event embedded in a whole season of moneypot auctions this spring—have become so outrageous.

He cites a study completed two years ago by researchers at Yale and Tilburg University that looked at two centuries of incomes and art sales (abstract here).

It showed, he says, that the single factor most involved in the into-orbit leap in art prices in the period between 1908 and 2005 was the increase in income inequality.

I haven't read the study, so I don't know whether he's playing at all fast and loose with the researchers' own interpretation of their data. But on the other hand, the conclusion seems obvious: The prices of "priceless" things are predicated on nothing but the ability of the extremely rich to pay them. Unless I am missing something, Knight's point that the art world is only a freak show to the extent that the world of the wealthy is a freak show is redundant: They are the same world. What I appreciate about his post is that he's connecting them, or calling out the typically obscured connection.

The fact that he's doing it in order to one-up New York critic Jerry Saltz, whom he refuses to refer to by name and instead only calls an "art expert" who appeared on a morning talk show, is kind of silly. They're on the same side. As someone pointed out to me the other day, if Charlie Rose and Gayle King treated their CEO interviewees as critically as they treated Saltz—"Why, Jerry, why?"—or if Saltz were allowed to ask them just how much they made or spent on their most prized commodities, well, we'd be living in a different world.

As a work of art.

• Courtesy the artists and Photo Center NW
• Welcome Figure by Steven Miller and Adrain Chesser, on display at Photographic Center Northwest.

There's something inherently funny about this picture by Steven Miller and Adrain Chesser. Obviously, it's the fact that it's a stereotype (foggy, soggy Pacific Northwest) within a stereotype (gay costume bear replete with furry penis).

But the solemn way he's perched on the stump in the middle of the devastated clear-cut forest is matched by the seriousness of the historical reference: a "welcome figure" is a traditional carving created by the Salish-speaking native people of this land. (Salish do not, contrary to popular belief, create totem poles.*)

If the land has already been raped, what is the point of a welcome sign? If the welcome sign is held by a marginalized figure, what are the possibilities for this place?

On the other hand, this is the opposite of a fake picture designed to attract tourists. (Seattle made its name in the world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by mass-circulating postcards with a totem pole on them—it was known as the totem pole city.) This photograph is so harshly beautiful that those who respond to the invitation might be the ones to make a better future. It is a picture designed to attract (and to create) future natives.

^{*Here is a video of a prominent welcome figure dedicated in downtown Tacoma in 2010, by Puyallup artist Sean Peterson. Jump to 2:13 to see the sculpture itself.}

• Courtesy the artist and Lawrimore Project
• The hard heads and soft pillars of Wynne Greenwood.

Wynne Greenwood's new sculptures are gray heads set on brightly colored pedestals made of fabric she hand-dyed and sewed around plinths of foam.

Pedestals are usually hard, not soft. They are usually dull, not bright.

Busts, meanwhile, are usually made of fine materials. These look like concrete. And busts usually seem to thrust upward, independent of their pedestals. These slouch down into their pedestals, showing their weight like bodies on memory foam. The crease where they make contact is touching; it sticks in the mind. (In ceramics, there is also an entire philosophy associated with how the base is shaped, whether it is flat or curved—a certain curvature creates a shadow that lends the object more appearance of weight.)

The heads on the pedestals have more than one face, suggesting conflict. They have a deeper conflict, too: They're not made of concrete but of more delicate porcelain. Their surfaces still bear the impressions of the artist's hands—scratch marks, fingerprints, signs of shaping—but the paint color gives their soft skin a stony topcoat.

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What do you want to be buried in? Artists like Mark Mitchell, Anna Rose Telcs, and Susan Robb are here to give you new ideas.

• The Stranger
• THIS COULD BE YOUR HAIR And your ashes. Urn by Rachael Jensen.

• Courtesy the artist and Photographic Center Northwest
• This is Cat and Brittany, in Iowa City, Iowa. Photograph by Molly Landreth.

The red-lipsticked, true-happy smile is right in the center, like a red heart. Radiating out from the symmetry of those two perfectly paired lips is the perfect pairing of everything else in the photograph by Seattle's Molly Landreth. The double stack of pillows matches the double bodies, a billowy nest, punctuated by the pair of pointed wall lamps. The two images on the walls frame the contemporary women in a lineage. They fit—fit together, and fit in, like nesting dolls, to history. They are not only embraced by each other but also by an entire self-contained system. The vibrating visual geometry brings to mind Tee Corinne's kaleidoscopic Yantras. (At Photo Center NW.)

• Courtesy the artist (Robert Yoder) and Platform Gallery
• Untitled (Ian Again) is a dick picture. They all are. The dicks are hidden under the paint.

The wink/nod/clue to Robert Yoder's new show is its title: DILF!

Under every painted surface, there's a porn shot. You can't see the dicks anymore, but they're there, collaged on first, before anything else.

"To expose myself is vital in my work," Yoder writes in his statement for the show, at Platform Gallery (plenty of images). But he doesn't expose himself, or anyone else. No body parts appear. Instead, Yoder covers over, conceals, clothes porn in paint. And not just any paint, but white paint. Clean white paint, flecked with areas that glow flesh-pink, flesh-orange, flesh-brown. It's a whitewash that constantly points itself out. It's both a flirtation and an admission of shame.

Hiding is the commonest of queer survival strategies; the historic art exhibition Hide/Seek didn't get its name by accident. There are a million ways to hide in plain sight in art. Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg used a whole private language of codes and suggestions, puns and symbols. So does Jeffry Mitchell—they're just more obvious. But the act of coding itself—even if the codes are plainly breakable—is a testament to why art museums still need "queering," as this weekend's symposium in Seattle will discuss. Museums might be staffed by perfectly queer and queer-friendly people, but their "objective" stance implicitly supports what's considered "normal" unless that white, even facade is highlighted or broken in some way. (And it shouldn't always have to be the artists themselves who do the highlighting and the breaking.)

Yoder's other tactic in DILF! is spatial. He hangs the paintings and drawings in funny groupings, like little like-minded congregations, or in funny spots on the wall. One piece, Untitled (Lukas) is an oil painting (over a hidden porn shot) mounted on a layer of mylar. It hangs off-center on the back wall of the gallery, which means you see it immediately when you enter, at the far end. It also hangs low (maybe genital height?). The reflective mylar backing creates the illusion that the painting is set in a dark hole cut in the wall. It feels like the painting wishes it were fucking the gallery, in senses both playful and sad.