I miss Richard Martin.

The first installment of selected fashions from LACMA’s permanent collection displays some exquisite frocks but almost no curatorial principle beyond the brainstorm of arranging the outfits chronologically by decade. The first due that something’s amiss is in the brief press release, which includes the phrase “installed in four rotations . . . on view through January 6, 2003.” There is no indication here or elsewhere why certain dresses or designers were selected (or by what criteria they will be “rotated”). It’s certainly not that each piece of clothing embodies the

Charles Gaines’s latest wall pieces combine photographs culled from various agencies’ archives of accident reports from Mount Rainier with textual accounts of the specific mishaps. Borrowing from Conceptual art, print journalism, and history painting, Gaines centered each of the five clusters of images and texts on view around a large black-and-white photo of the Washington mountain overlaid with white text telling fascinating, at times morbid tales of fate and folly, tragedy and survival: Absent Figures: Brigham Files (all works 2000), for instance, describes the miraculous survival of four