The Cool School - Walter Hopps

(photo: taken from Amazon.com)

The Cool School is first, and foremost, a documentary on the dos and don'ts in the art scene. It is also a biography of Walter Hopps, a legendary American Art director and 'first' curator of Modern Art in Los Angeles region. It focuses on the Ferus Gallery in L.A. around the 40s - 50s, an extremely conservative area, where the art community was completely invisible. *Spoiler Alert* In the end, the Ferus Gallery stops operating in 1966 and the artists that boomed from these exhibitions left their 'brotherhood' behind until recently (2007) when the film The Cool School was released.

Although the Gallery itself had not flourish in sales as it did in visitors, the past teaches one to not make the same mistakes, but make new ones. I personally enjoyed the grandeur of conversation in The Cool School. In a sense the film evoked a care-free, nonchalant emergence of the art scene through constant deliberation of artist and work selection (which artists are chosen for the exhibit), design (how the design of the exhibition was going to look), and audience (who will benefit from the exhibition?). This is something that interests me greatly: the power relationship/interaction between curator and artist; and how they build/ create/ fabricate a piece of history by exhibiting art objects. According to the film, this is also known as 'the art scene.'

I am also interested in the exhibition design that Walter Hopps uses towards the end of the film, where he exhibits Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup prints. The satirical placement of prints on the wall as if they were 'high art' (the kind that are French, Italian, and Spanish) like the "Masters" was the best part in my opinion. Similar to that of other controversial exhibitions such as "Mining the Museum" and "The Enola Gay." Although these exhibitions and Hopp's Andy Warhol Solo Exhibition were saucy and almost disturbing, they were so radically different that it shifted museology paradigm into an interactive and 'think-for-yourself' approach.

(REFER to http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/coolschool/film.html for more information about the film).