We tip our hat to Grammar.police for pointing us to a May 1 piece in the Post we missed when we were on vacation where Blake Gopnik pushed the idea of renaming the Corcoran Gallery of Art to bring in more visitors. Saying the current Corcoran name has an identity problem, Gopnik suggests a name promoting it as a national center of photography:

You could even imagine that the Corcoran Museum of Photography — why not make that the National Museum of Photography at the Corcoran, to give it a more patriotic ring — could come to be used by the country’s other museums and archives as a kind of extension to the limited photo space they already have.

In a long, drawn-out parsing of Gopnik’s suggestions and his approach, parts of the D.C. arts blogging world weighed in, as did the Corcoran.

Says David Levy, the president and director of the Corcoran’s gallery and college (shown at right in this DOT photo) in a letter to the Post:

Taken in its entirety, Gopnik’s proposal might be hard to reconcile with our continuing mission to present the Corcoran’s choice collection of American art (of particular resonance in this capital city) or with its very strong educational and community orientation. Still, he suggests a promising direction, not just for this museum but for our city and our national patrimony.

Everyone essentially has dismissed Gopnik’s suggestion in one form or another. The Gopnik parsing game, which can be a favorite pastime of local arts observers, continues.