It's not just the courting of the Boston fashion world that the MFA is planning as "Fashion Fall" with events, speakers and other artists that makes an Avedon show special. Now, of course, the MFA is well on its way to embracing popular taste (and providing an historical context when it can) and there is an Herb Ritts Gallery in the Museum itself (a fitting and generous memorial, it's currently housing the very worthy work of documentary photographer Nicholas Nixon), and a show about Richard Avedon comes not as a shock, but as a near necessity. I should have thrown up my hands right then. Then I noticed that the public arguments about the "controversial" show didn't center on artistic merit or the spectre of a commercial photographer (an oxymoron if there ever was one, or at least a redundancy), but were mostly about the "shocking" display of so much nudity in such a venerable Boston institution. It seemed to be about celebrity and popularity more than about art, and felt like a suspect move considering the MFA we knew up to that point. Years ago, near the beginning of Malcolm Rogers' tenure as director of the Museum of Fine Arts, I reviewed a huge Herb Ritts retrospective and wasn't very impressed. The model dances with her long braid and dress by Kimberly.
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