Most people don’t give much thought to how
our cultural institutions shape our world view, and the impact this has on
politics, but I’m one of those who do. This can make it problematic to attend a
modern art museum with me, a task my wife, a genuine and sophisticated art
lover, approaches with a mixture of caution and bravado. While I’ve learned to
stifle my public outbursts and gesticulations, her uncanny ability to read my
mind invariably generates a burst of frisson best resolved by leaving the
museum to take her to an expensive lunch.
It’s not the
fraud that I mind—more power to any artist who can con a patron into paying
outrageous sums of money for something as banal as a black stripe on a blank
white canvas or a rusty bicycle hanging from a rope. There is no harm in
separating a fool from his money as long as it’s not mine.
I can even accommodate myself to the
widespread and concerted effort to destroy the very idea of artistic talent
evident in most contemporary art, giving talentless frauds the
opportunity to pursue lucrative careers and teaching positions. The world will
still be filled with beauty and genius even if the public is snookered into
believing a million dead and rotting flies glued
to a canvas merits display in the Boston Museum of Fine Art. (I kid you not.
Since being drawn to that stinking canvas by the odor some years ago I have
never again set foot in the MFA.)
But I draw the
line when an artist mounts a direct and nihilistic attack on Western
Civilization that seeks to subvert the values that allow us all to survive and
thrive. Consider—flouting of Godwin’s Law notwithstanding—that
in the 1930s sophisticated Germans who read Mein Kampf simply shrugged their
shoulders, not believing that its author meant what he said, and quietly went
about their business. But Hitler understood what many of his readers
didn’t—that ideas have consequences.
So, with
that notion in mind, let’s have a look at what our so-called cultural leaders
consider meritorious art.
I write
these words hours after attending an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York City titled “9+1 Ways of Being
Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design.” Of all the arts, architecture is the
one most subject to the judgment of reality in that buildings must not fall
over and should at least be expected to shelter occupants from the elements
(although failure to adequately do so never seemed to hurt Frank Gehry’s career).
Most of the
exhibit is quite dreary and unremarkable. I was a little jarred by a
lithograph, “Utope Dynamit” by Gunter Rambow done in 1976 that
depicts a modern glass and steel skyscraper being blown apart from the
midsection. I wonder what went through Rambow’s head when Islamist nihilists
brought his artistic vision to life on 9/11?
But the
exhibit that forced my wife to drag me out of the museum before the fumes
coming out of my ears threatened to make my head explode was a video called “Burn” by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley.
This 10-minute film loop features an ordinary house filled with ordinary people
slowly burning, the occupants not even noticing their own destruction as they
go through the motions of living draped in thick ennui. Lest we mistakenly
believe that the fire is the work of an impartial universe, one scene shows a
demented arsonist pouring gasoline on the bed of a sleeping woman before
setting it on fire. The woman is burnt to a cinder without even crying out.
Get it? The
arsonist is the artist. The house is society. The slowly burning pantry and
refrigerator, filled with ordinary food items we take for granted and without
which we would starve, is our economy. The burning books and newspapers turning
to ash in the hands of the characters is our literate rationality, eaten away
by the rot of a cultural assault that has been going on for decades. The woman
who doesn’t even cry out is you.
I suppose I
understand why the artist made this work. It is surely preferable for him to
express his angst this way as opposed to, say, gunning down innocent people in
a theater. But the Museum of Modern Art honoring such abominations with public
display is despicable beyond words.
It will be
some time before I set foot in the MOMA again. My favorite works will still be there, plus
I can always view them online. Artistic talent, past and present, will still
exist in the world and I can honor it in my own way. But if more people don’t
speak up when civilization comes under existential attack by envious losers who
prefer to destroy what they cannot build, our prospects may be bleak indeed.
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