Friday, January 27, 2012 / 12:51 pm
Reason No. 147 Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Arts Commissions
They would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: art | Richard Serra | Anita Garouni | folk art
You know what I hate? Besides the rest of it? Arts commissions!
“But Commie Girl!” you’re whining in your usual fuddle, “Arts commissions are full of people who care about art and want to beautify our city! How could you take your usual shiv to them?”
Easy! Arts commissions are full of stuck-up bureaucrats enforcing their staid aesthetic; they’ll approve just about any twisted hunk of metal if it’s got the name “Serra” attached; and they would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance. They don’t get folk art, and never have. In Fullerton, the arts commission that oversees the small percent of developer money that must go to public art has approved hideous statues of girls doing rhythmic gymnastics, and I think that in itself should DQ all arts commissions for good.
Via KPCC today, we have yet another example of arts commissions determining for the rest of us that something is crap.
Anita Garouni donated her painting Home to the City of Glendale. There are two ladies with lamps; Mt. Ararat; various floating heads who would doubtless be recognizable to Garouni’s fellow Armenians but to me just look like Lenin and Eleanor Roosevelt. (I know: same thing right?) It is delightfully wack, and Garouni is awesome.
But Glendale was embarrassed by the naive quality of the work, and turned the gift down, claiming it wasn’t culturally inclusive enough. Has the City of Glendale been to Glendale lately? There are some Armenians there. And showcasing the Armenian community’s love for their American home seems to me to be completely culturally inclusive. Nobody tells Boyle Heights not to showcase murals featuring Latinos. Nobody tells South LA not to paint Martin Luther King. And nobody tells rich white people not to erect their godawful Richard Serras where the rest of us have to look at them.
rebecca@fourstory.org
Comments
yeah. gary’s right.
Commie Girl is BACK!!!!
YAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!!!
2012-01-30 by donna
Hi, Rebecca! Yet another excellent piece of writing. And this one really struck a nerve with me. I’ve never been a fan of Richard Serra. And I expressed my views about his art for the one-percenters back in 1985, via a letter-to-the-editor that was published in the July 1985 issue of Art and Auction. It’s hard to believe that nearly three decades have passed since then. Serra had done one of his steel nightmares, a piece called “Tilted Arc,” at the Federal Plaza in NYC. The folks who were working in that part of town were none too pleased. It was basically just a big slab of steel that ruined their area for taking lunch breaks. And they understandably complained about it. But of course, seeing as they were just common working stiffs, Serra, with a wave of his plutocratic white-tower hand, dismissed the complainers as “barbarians.” Here is an excerpt from my letter: “...Perhaps he [Serra] should remember that the source of his $175,000 commission came from the less fortunate pockets of the general public, including those who work at dull day-long jobs in the building his sculpture faces. It is my feeling that Serra should keep in mind the fact that when he accepts public funds as payment for his work, the general public become his patrons and, as such, should not be thought of as “barbarians” (at least not while they are paying his bills).”
Well, the good news is that our voices were finally heard: “Titled Arc” finally tilted into oblivion on the night of March 15, 1989, having been demolished by the U.S. Government. Hard to believe it, but true - and the workers reclaimed their park. It took four long years, but that is a good reminder to all of us that if we persist - we can prevail.
So thank you for this post, Rebecca. Another stellar job! There is obviously still much work to be done. We must keep on fighting the good fight!
2012-01-29 by Gary Eisenberg