Photo of the Week: The Washington City Paper's art critic Glenn Dixon posing in front of Olympia's boudoir.

And here is Dixon's review of "Beyond the Frame, Impressionism Revisited: The Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr.," at the Corcoran. This show has been trashed so much and so widely, that it has become sort of a cult must-see here in Washington.

A rehash of my Oct 27 posting: The show has been brutalized in the critical press practically everywhere, and yet as bad as the show is, there's a conceptual connection between Johnson's work (take a famous Impressionist painting and make it into a lifesized 3-D tableaux of sculptures) and the Turner Prize-nominated Chapman Brothers in Britain.

Jake and Dinos Chapman's early work was based on Goya's series of etchings, Disasters of War. Initially they used plastic figures to re-create Goya in a miniature three-dimensional form, and like Johnson (later on), one of these 83 scenes became a life-sized version using mannequins (Johnson is a multimillionaire and thus he creates bronze figures).

This sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead of two mutilated and castrated bodies, was shown at the famous "Sensation" show in London in 1997.

I suspect that no museum in America would dare to show Great Deeds Against the Dead, but it is remarkable that the connection between Johnson and the Chapman Brothers is so obvious and yet the critical reaction to their work so vastly different.

I also suspect that the sickly sweet overexposure of Impressionism as the subject of Johnson's works has something to do with the negative critical reaction to his work, while the macabre nature of Goya's etchings brought to a life size display, appeals to the gimmick of "shock" that has become the standard and Achilles heel of contemporary British art.

By the way, the Chapman Brothers have moved on, but continue to use mannequins in their artwork, which they say is about "producing things with zero culture value, to produce aesthetic inertia - a series of works of art to be consumed and then forgotten." To me that brings them even closer to J. Seward Johnson.

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