Meg Cranston. Rock Bottom, 2005. Paper, gelatin silver prints, varnish. Dimensions variable. Installation view, Michael Janssen Galerie, Cologne.

My sister, who is on a Fulbright in Thailand and living in a small village in the Uttaradit Province, realized a week ago that she needed a haircut. This was nerve-wracking. There were cultural differences and language barriers involved, and nothing makes you crabbier than a haircut that isn’t right. She asked a woman named P’Oong, and said “My hair is not beautiful,” partly because it was truly how she felt, partly because it was something she knew how to say in Thai. P’Oong pulled back her hair and said, “Chai ka. Oh, but your face is beautiful and your eyes are the sea (ta-lay) and your smile is genuine (jingjai) and your body is catwalk.” Wrote my sister, “For the rest of my life, I will fly back to P’Oong to get my hair cut.”

Good curators are like good hairdressers, writes artist Meg Cranston in a smart 2011 essay for Bard’s Red Hook Journal for Curatorial Studies. “Younger curators in particular tend to see their job as a hermeneutic pursuit to uncover or properly define the themes illustrated by objects in the work,” she explains.  This is the “curator as journalist” method, exhibition-assembling as a fact-finding, storytelling mission. But once the story is found and told, the objects are just placeholders, and “the exhibition doesn’t really matter.” Instead, curators should be far more superficial and image focused: like hairdressers, “the best ones make you look good, the worst ones ask how they should cut your hair.” The best curators have “the goal of creating a captivating appearance that eases the burden of received notions of truth.”

This is NOT easy. Those curators who ask artists what their work means and how it should hang and think hard about themes and ideas, might spend long hours over press releases and essays. They might work really, really hard like an academic does on a thesis. But I have read wrought over essays and seen shows that try to convey big ideas more often than I have seen shows that hit that right note and put art together in a way that seduces upon first sight.

Superstudio, Cube of Forest on the Golden Gate, 1970–71, Collage with photogravure and alterations in crayon, 29 1/2 × 42 5/16 in., Collection of the heirs of Roberto Magris.

I am thinking about curators right now in particular because the land art show “Ends of the Earth” opened at MOCA last weekend and the “Made in L.A.” show, L.A.’s first official city biennial, opens tomorrow. “Ends of the Earth” was curated by two of the smartest contemporary, scholarly art thinkers in this city: Philipp Kaiser, who came to this city in 2007 and will leave soon to become director of  Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and Miwon Kwan, who wrote One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity in 2002 and teaches at UCLA. The show has these great moments, like in the room where Italian artist Pino Pascali’s two blocks of packed earth are hung high sticking out from otherwise perfectly white walls or the little corridor hung with Keith Arnatt’s small photos of a hole revealed by the artist’s shadow and heads sticking out from under sand. But other rooms feel like text books. They require too much reading and figuring out.

A view of "Architectural Dispositions" from outside the front windows. Photo by Joshua White.

“Made in L.A.” was put together by five curators — Malik Gaines, Cesar Garcia and Lauri Firstenberg from non-profit LAXArt and Ali Subotnick and Anne Ellegood of the Hammer Museum. They chose who would represent “underrepresented”  L.A., then commissioned new work from the chosen ones. I have only caught glimpses so far, and am intensely curious to see how their vision of L.A. art looks all together.

But I wonder if the best curated exhibition in L.A. right now isn’t the small group show at Thomas Solomon Gallery. It’s a painting show, up through June 9, and while I am not fond of most post-60s abstraction, this show charmed me. I loved the way Analia Saban’s Study For Erosion fall apart in a perfectly orchestrated way, how N. Dash’s Healer — a primed canvas hung over a sheet of primed linen — wrinkles at the bottom and how Daniel Buren’s striped canvas looks as domestic as a newly pressed bedsheet and yet is powerful enough to hold down the room.

Pipilotti Rist, "Sip My Ocean," 1996

Within the past five years two all-male bands have covered the ire-raising, too-sweet-for-comfort single by The Crystals, “He Hit Me (And it Felt Like a Kiss).” Carole King and Gerry Goffin purportedly wrote the song after learning singer Little Eva had been beaten, multiple times, by her boyfriend, though Eva claimed the beatings were motivated by love. Phil Spector produced the song in 1962, letting not a note of irony seep through. “If he didn’t care for me/I could have never made him mad/He hit me and I was glad”: the song’s seeming sincerity and the near gleefulness of its sound got it banned on radio stations around the country. It justified victimhood, claimed powers-that-be.

The Blackeyed Susans’ 2009 rendition, called “She Hit Me,” nearly purges the song of it’s tooth—the “she” doing the hitting seems hot-tempered perhaps, but otherwise fairly tame. Grizzly Bear’s 2007 cover keeps “He” as the pronoun, and quiets the song. The man-on-man violence it evokes seems to play out on a leveler field, and the moodiness of the vocals come from a place of personal darkness rather than abused submission. Certainly, neither cover vindicates the female protagonist trapped in The Crystal’s original recording.

Rosha Yaghmai, "Love Forever," 2011, Fiberglass, gel coat, resin, enamel, steel 34 x 77 x 54 inches.

Covers are complicated projects. They let you be a fan, but also a collaborator, a history changer or, sometimes, a subverter. Musicians take them on far more freely than visual artists do; artists tend to prefer “appropriation” when feeling cynical and “homage” when feeling affectionate. But there have been a few memorable art covers, the most compelling of which may be Pipolotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean (1996), a two-channel video installation of a body in water. The soundtrack is Rist singing Chris Isaak’s stiflingly smug Wicked Game, and if you look for her cover on iTunes, you’ll find it under “I’m a victim of this Song.” Around minute three, you hear a screaming echo in the background that sounds like it’s trying to break free of the song’s over-sentimental structure: “No, I don’t want to fall in love,” it crows.

In her current solo exhibition at Thomas Solomon Gallery in Chinatown, Ever let the fancy roam, artist Rosha Yaghmai takes a less far less hostile approach to covers than Rist. She covers self-described Japanese “obsessional artist” Yayoi Kusama in a sculpture called Love Forever, which takes its title from Kusama’s 1998 MoMA retrospective and its form, in a pared down way, from  Accumulation No. 2, a couch covered in white protuberances.

Yayoi Kusama, "Accumulation No. 2," 1968.

In a 1999 interview with BOMB Magazine, Kusama explained, “As an obsessional artist I fear everything I see. At one time, I dreaded everything I was making. The [furniture] thickly covered in phalluses was my psychosomatic work done when I had a fear of sexual vision.” This nightmarish quality is all but gone in Yaghmai’s fiberglass form, a smooth white body that look more like the ghostly sheets thrown over furniture in old houses than a sofa itself. It’s gentle and protuberance-free, and mainly just reinforces its title: love for Kusama, and for the tactile appeal of lovingly crafted physical objects, will continue forever.

If it’s unnerving when a cover of a song as implicitly brutal as “He Hit Me” tames or even overlooks that  brutality,  it’s also unnerving when a re-imagining of work as aggressive and textured as Kusama’s is quiet and smooth. But Yaghmai’s  sculpture seems honest; smoothness is where Kusama’s influence belongs in her mind, and maybe the real question to ask is, how can aggression fade into smooth beauty over time and does this fading mean we’ve lost something or gained something along the way?