IF THERE'S ANY sure thing about local arts this fall, it's the October conclusion of 'Hearts in San Francisco,' which is cause for celebration. The gracious project will generate much-needed money for San Francisco General Hospital, but it suffers from overbreeding – the bulbous forms seem to have mated, and more often than not, their homely offspring end up stranded on street corners and traffic islands. It's hard to love 'em.

Diamonds and rust
Glamour disguises unrest in the season's visual arts programming.

By Glen Helfand

Last fall we anxiously anticipated a pair of events more fascinating than any work of performance art: the recall election and San Francisco's mayoral race. Today Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is behaving as expected, exploiting his celebrity and banking on the assumption that voters mistake politics for the People's Choice Awards. Mayor Gavin Newsom, trading on a different kind of suaveness, surprised many with his bold gay-marriage move, generating courtroom controversy and complex ripples of national dialogue. Despite major differences in ambition and manner, both politicians bring a smooth – sometimes oily – face to California's political and cultural positions. But the arts haven't fared too well under either of these guys. Budgets are imperiled on state and local levels and probably won't get better anytime soon.

This fall brings the presidential election, which will generate larger and perhaps scarier social, cultural, and geopolitical shifts. In galleries and museums a chilling effect has taken hold. There's no great proliferation of angry visual art, as there was during the Reagan administration; instead, subtext reigns supreme. Perhaps this stems from a mix of confusion and disbelief regarding the macabre yet unplumbed depths of Bush policy and campaign strategy. The limited choices on offer in November come down to persona as much as ideology – Dubya and John Kerry are engaged in a battle that hinges on theatrical characterizations of their maleness. It's an old-fashioned duel masquerading as contemporary spectacle, and it pits the president's Wild West swagger against the "sensitive" heroism of his Democratic challenger.

Scrutinize the cultural fabric closely and you'll find ideological threads that connect this theatricality to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's big fall offering, a splashy design show called 'Glamour: Fashion, Industrial Design, Architecture' (Oct. 9-Jan. 17, 2005). Even before one looks at the exhibition's gleaming sports cars, jewel-encrusted designer gowns, and lust-inducing furniture, the word glamour inspires Cristal-soaked, bling-sparked visions of excess. Curator Joseph Rosa, a man steeped in design ideas, is more than equipped to decode the consumer beliefs embedded in a sleek-and-sturdy Cadillac Escalade. He's titled his catalogue introduction "Fabricating Affluence" – a phrase that could easily describe creative corporate (and government) accounting practices. Rosa observes that "glamour embraces elegance as well as aspiration, upward mobility, the flexibility of class boundaries, and the state of being self-made, both monetarily and culturally"; his show is positioned to showcase the seductiveness of prized objects and to comment on their insidious, perhaps fascistic sway.

Dreams of luxury can function as a survival mechanism amid tough times. During the Great Depression, the masses checked into opulently art-directed Busby Berkeley musicals. Today our major anxieties lead to fantasy films like the Spider-Man and Harry Potter series (in the Potter books, glamour is used as a cloaking device). Shopping therapy also kicks into high gear – for those who can afford it. In Sore Losers, a razor-sharp and surprisingly entertaining cultural critique of the Bush years, critic John Powers notes how, post-9/11, Americans "hoped to deal with scary new realities the way Sex and the City dealt with the attacks on Manhattan – acknowledging the city's wounds by making its shops, restaurants, and streets more glamorous than ever." There's that g-word again.

"Glamour" will be on view at SFMOMA near-concurrently with 'Roy Lichtenstein: All about Art' (Oct. 23-Feb. 22, 2005), an exhibition that strikes a redundant chord in the wake of the museum's current street-bannered show of pop art. Yet perhaps the two exhibitions will draw fitting parallels between the consumerist shock-and-awe tactics of pop – which also ascended during war years – and the 21st century's Target-marketed revolutions in design, technology, and outsourced production.

We'll have to wait and see how both play out, but 'Beautiful Losers,' Yerba Buena Center for the Arts' exploration of street-culture glam, is open now (through Oct. 10). The work it contains may adopt a stance of deceptively funky defiance, but the presentation of this energetic show is big and slick. An underacknowledged pulse of co-optation and commodification beats close to the surface. How are we meant to reconcile the fact that a number of these signature rebels have created stylish corporate ad campaigns (Mike Mills, Geoff McFetridge), directed major motion pictures (Spike Jonze), or turned a faux-propaganda wheat-pasting campaign into a ubiquitous line of collectibles (Shepard Fairey)?

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this; rather, the phenomenon demonstrates a contemporary cultural dilemma: questions of the marketplace are never far from any act of creative expression. The show, fittingly, is filled with merchandise – seamless plastic figures; designer skateboards, T-shirts, books, and stickers – that can be purchased on-site. These artists create to live, both psychologically and economically, and why shouldn't they? Yet the beautiful losers have become successful pop icons in the process, and in that regard, they have a constituency as ardent and object-obsessed as those who may line up to see a Christian Dior dress or a Marc Newsom chair at SFMOMA.

The act of persuading various publics to embrace specific values is the foregrounded topic of an October show at Intersection for the Arts titled 'Paper Bullets' (Oct. 6-Dec. 4). The project, featuring a range of related events, assigns artists (including Sandow Birk, Rene Garcia, Packard Jennings and Kara Maria) to create new works on the topic of military psychological operations, a.k.a. PSYOP, an official division that – among other acts – airdrops leaflets into Middle Eastern hot spots to help convert the populace to U.S. belief systems. "Paper Bullets" aims to be politically "incite-ful," while operating on a smaller scale than the aforementioned high-profile shows. In a similar spirit, Southern Exposure mounts 'The Way We Work' (Sept. 10-Oct. 23), an exhibition of international projects focusing on collaborative production as much as on service-related product. It includes art-related publishing, radio broadcasts, café-like settings, and some surprise forms of interaction. These alternative-space shows might not be as alluring as "Glamour," but perhaps they'll prove to be just as provocative. For gallery and museum addresses, hours, and contact information, see Art listings.

The hit list

Keep an eye out for 'Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art' at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts (Sept. 23-Dec. 11); mixed media by Rebeca Bollinger at Rena Bransten Gallery (Oct. 21-Nov. 27); 'Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya' at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (Sept. 4-Jan. 2, 2005); 'human/nature' by Binh Danh at Haines Gallery (Sept. 9-Oct. 30); and 'Threshold: Byron Kim 1990-2004' at the UC Berkeley Art Museum (Sept. 15-Dec. 12).