Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on Art.

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

The debut show, “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary,” is supposed to be about how artists reuse humble or unusual materials. There’s good work here, but much of what’s on view is actually more about obsession and repetition: a couch made out of 3,500 quarters, a necklace composed of 100 handgun triggers. The building, too, seems caught between wanting to be an object of decorative delectation and making an architectural statement.

When museums are built these days, architects, directors, and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties, eat dinner, wine-and-dine donors. Sure, these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.

Craft is not a category; it's a means. The folks running the museum [Museum of Arts and Design]are sharp, and they know this, but they are in a bind.