Yesterday I saw the two new shows that have been Flashing the Seattle Art Museum's home page to death (they both open tomorrow), and at first blush I was disappointed.

That's not quite true. I didn't have high hopes for the Michelangelo exhibition anyway, and it's pretty much what I thought it would be: something between a hagiography and a roadside attraction. Lives of the saints and what have you, distilled for a childlike audience ("Imagine that you were in the marble quarries alongside Michelangelo in 1518," the label reads for a grocery list Michelangelo illustrated for a servant).

I have yet to read the catalog, which may be much more interesting. And there are, it's true, a few sketches by the artist himself (most of the material is "after" or about him) that are terribly moving, especially his study for the Sistine Chapel Last Judgment Adam. Curatorial adviser Gary Radke gives a talk about the show Friday night. Maybe the most delicious part of the show is that Michelangelo tried like hell to destroy his unfinished works, setting fire to almost all of them in order to keep tight control of his output. He was a celebrity and he knew how to work his image.

No, what got me down yesterday was the Calder show.

I'm not going to get into it in detail here, but suffice it to say that the show is cold and seemingly without any point of view at all. The work looks good if a little overpresented, and some of it looks and is great. It is very, very bright in there. Bright and white-walled. Perfectly modernist.

But figuratively speaking the show sheds very little light. Calder has become an oddly important artist in Seattle. His Eagle towers over the city like the little brother of the Space Needle. This iconicity situation was trotted out during the press preview (along with the dubious notion that the Michelangelo and Calder exhibitions are somehow related: why this forced knitting? It just makes the museum seem small). And most of the works, like Eagle, are at the museum courtesy of Seattle collectors Jon and Mary Shirley. So if this artist is so important to so many people in this city, you'd think the museum would take this opportunity to tell us just who on earth this man was. What motivated him, for starters.

Instead, the presentation of the show is all in formal terms. Here he is, using a cantilever. Here he is, using an even more pronounced cantilever! Fine. But is it not possible to tie these works to larger issues in art, architecture, politics, and history? Why such a silent presentation?

I am not a Calder expert, so I'm going to give my questions some serious thought (and do some more research) before attempting to answer them. But that's what first came to mind.