The Tears of Things

Filling A Hole

by Jerome du Bois

During this Janet Echelman sculpture controversy I thought "jellyfish" was a severe enough epithet; but that was before I visited the comments section today on azcentral.com's latest story about this most recent example of the percent-for-art boondoggle that plagues cities nationwide. Some of these commenters need to get out of the bathroom. Lordy. And people call us harsh? People call us negative? Lordy.

I was going to do a vote count, but the comment pages kept piling up, up, up all day to about twenty-two as of this writing now; but I stopped at five pages with a count of 40 against the thing, 9 irrelevant posts, and 2 for the thing. Do you really need to do the math?

The best comment so far was by someone who logged in as Scott4752:

That reminds me of the scene in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" when John Candy sells shower curtain hangers to naive and gullible teenage girls as 'hoop ear-rings'. He closed the sale with the following line: "I think they make you look older." That line is equivalent to "I think this 'desert flower' makes Phoenix look like a sophisticated city."

Pretty good.

(And I'd like to thank "Murphy45" for the link and the compliment. Thanks for reading.)

Then we read something from a poster calling theirself (well, what am I supposed to call him/her/both?) Dred, who writes that the most important aspect of the sculpture is as a very expensive conversation piece:

Art is in the eye of the beholder, but it should also provoke conversation. And if the conversation turns to how ugly something is, then that piece of art has made you think about it, formulate an opinion, and express that said opinion. Frankly I abhor the popular music most kids listen to and the video games that they are addicted to, but I respect your right to enjoy them. Please learn to respect the right of others who want some iconic art piece to be exhibited in this park. Have you bothered to look at the work in Portugal? It is amazing. People talk about it and they will talk about this work too. No [sic] says that you have to like it.

PEOPLE WILL TALK ABOUT IT. Oh, gold itself pales to this gift!

But people always talk, don't they? It's the same price as rain.

What dreadful Dred really wants is for you to take your art medicine. This art will be good for you, you dumb bunny, just hold your nose and listen to the experts and bow to their will and take your medicine.

Dred and "artivist" and "validation" and some others get all exercised about the how the money is earmarked. They treat the percent for art law as if it was carved by Hammurabi himself. Laws change all the time. Art funds are not magic money teleported from Platonia that simply won't fit into another, ordinary budget. It's a fact that there's only so much money to go around, so money that, by statute, must be earmarked for art, obviously goes into the subtraction when the whole pie is laid out. If a contractor must calculate that 1% in its bid, and it wins its contract on those terms from the city, then that 1% comes from taxpayers. It's the law. But it's not on the same level as a natural or physical law, that's for damn sure. It's just undeniable proof that some arts advocates got savvy about elbowing into their own place at the public banquet table. You think these artists just blow into town and lay their crazy ideas down? Remember, all these projects need to be solicited, researched, commissioned, shepherded to completion. Who better than people like Joe Baker and Dwight Walth and Andrea Norman and Susan Copeland to help us with our (forced) decision? I do believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that these are paid commissioners. If so, they've got a sweet scheme operating, all right.

Bunch of five-sided comedians.

Think about this: what would Janet Echleman do if she couldn't count on public money to make her giant works? How much would she believe in them, in their need to be, in their inevitability? How much? Would she --like Marcel Duchamp and Robert Irwin and Jeff Koons, for example, back in their respective days-- would she figure out a way to finance them herself, without the comforting concierges of public arts administration to encourage her, guide her, pay her? Or perhaps she must needs be known, and be satisfied, as the fiber artist who drops huge hippie hangings down between shopping-mall staircases, floor by floor by floor. . . .

Dred and others also believe that without forcing us to fork over some money for public art, none would ever be commissioned. Not only is this position historically ignorant, once again it's the paternalistic bullying of we-know-better elitism that every self-respecting individual, no matter what they feel about art, should resist, and resist strongly. I give Dred and all these others the double-middle-finger salute. You just don't get to tell me what's good for me, you arrogant bastards, because how could you possibly know? If you believe that people must be made to be good, then what does that make you ? So you back off, you back way off. Don't tread on me.

We are surrounded by weak, needy, groupthink artists who feel entitled. Entitled to what, you ask? Why, to everything, of course: a guaranteed career, money, tenure, validation, simply for being. You don't have to be a good artist, or even a mediocre artist; just an artist will do. It's a little open box on the form that you check off --ARTIST-- and hand over and the people that run the world nod and say, "Go on then, it's all set up." And all these artists without backbone, without an ounce of self-respect, believe it.

For over four years we have examined the actual words of hundreds of artists, local and worldwide; one of my first pieces on this blog satirized some of them; following the dictum that "out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks," we took them at their words. And their words were empty. The open speaking mouth of the contemporary artist is a black hole filled with emptiness, sucking significance out of everything and replacing it with a dry-ice nihilism that dessicates meaning and suffering and life itself into thin and twisted ghosts.

I pray their arc has already reached its apogee, and that the strong arms of gravitas already encompass their downfall.

Posted by Jerome at December 19, 2007 10:33 PM | TrackBack