If you didn't know it was happening you might have missed it: This past weekend the College Art Association's 92nd annual conference took place in Seattle, with academic arts professionals from all over frequenting the downtown convention center, attending discussions on all manner of arcane topics, such as "Necro-Techno: Examples of Media Archaeology" and "The Period-Room Debate and the Making of America's Public Art Museums."

Much of it was far too academic for me, although it might have been fun in a David Lodge sort of way. At any rate, I didn't manage to attend anything until Saturday afternoon's panel "After the Capital Campaign: Challenges to Museums," which, despite its unassuming title, promised to be a colloquium on what's happened to the Bellevue Art Museum.

What I thought would make it good was the presence on the panel of Brian Wallace, former BAM curator from what I consider the museum's halcyon days (which he was largely responsible for). Through the years of change--the capital campaign, the new building, the not-quite-clear conditions under which he was made to leave--Wallace has held his tongue, and I had a feeling that at this panel he was going to blow his top.

Which he did, although in his indefatigably polite way. After a brief round in which each panelist (including Rick Collette, BAM's president of the board of trustees) talked about "lessons learned" (a bit ludicrous, given that BAM hasn't yet proved that it's learned anything), Wallace took to task the new mission and vision statements that BAM has adopted--which were formulated by canvassing a few hundred people in the Eastside arts and business communities--telling Collette that this process is opposed to "the idea of individual brilliance," and that "when you put this to arts people... they have utter contempt for the process." Wallace said he didn't see how "mission and vision by committee" could lead to "interesting and captivating programming," nor to "the ability to raise 1.2 million dollars for a vision that isn't worth that."

The mission and vision he was talking about is a return to the craft-oriented programming from the museum's early days as an offshoot of the Bellevue Arts and Crafts Fair (see "Bottoms Up," The Stranger, Feb 5). What they're talking about is precisely the kind of homegrown programming you get when you ask local arts groups what they want to see in a local museum--why, their own work, of course! Collette, whose slumped posture signaled exhaustion, nonetheless said, "We're comfortable with what we've come up with."

The inquiry came to a halt when one participant--a woman whose name I didn't catch, and who was one of the only people in the small audience who was neither a reporter nor a former BAM employee--noted that the session was turning into a press conference instead of the panel discussion that she'd been promised. For the rest of the session we almost stuck to the facts of museum management, with one more flare-up about whose vision drives a museum. Only Collette seemed relieved; the rest of us stewed in disappointment.