Does Philip Kennicott know what year it is? The Washington Post arts critic just published an essay that seems to have arrived in a time portal from 1986.
“In Grim Times, Art Finds a Way” is a pious, flowery, and tiresome essay about how “the arts community” can respond to the darkness of the second Trump era. Yes, it’s tempting to roast the quivering imbecility of the piece, but besides its despondent tone the piece is striking for its anachronistic quality. Art, just like the media, is nowhere what it was several decades ago. Protest and political art are not just irrelevant, they’re scorned. These types of “art” are even, as is argued in the new issue of Harper’s magazine, bad for art itself.
There are two points that seem true about art in 2024. First, art is ubiquitous in a way it has never[i] been in any other culture at any time. Art is in comic books, in video games, in movies, in graphic design, on the walls of our churches, and as close as your phone. As the right crushes the old media, we can also become our own curators and ignore the official “arts community.”
Secondly, leftists need to question the childish oppositional stance of the “art community” and begin creating works that encourage regular Americans to visit museums. They need to stop throwing tantrums and create things that are objectively beautiful. Of course, I believe artists should be free to create any kind of art they want. But there is no obligation on the part of society to subsidize art that does not please it and to put it into museums.
Why do I ask if Philip Kennicott knows what year it is? Because in leading the charge to inspire artists to annoy Trump, he recalls Andres Serrano. Yes, Mr. “Piss Christ” himself.
In 1987 the infamous “artist” Serrano submerged a crucifix into a jar of his own urine and photographed it. It was blasphemous, idiotic, and controversial at the time. It still is the first two. Serrano apparently is still around and Kennicott is ready for him: Serrano has “created an installation of Trump images, collectibles, artifacts, all manner of ‘Trumpiana’ in a New York project he called “The Game: All Things Trump.”
Yawn. Really brave. I just turned 60 years old. When “Piss Christ” appeared in 1987 I was in college. That’s how long Serrano has been doing his schtick. Serrano, like the rest of the art world, is far less cutting edge than, say, Greg Gutfeld—or even your 14-year-old brother who just formed a libertarian punk rock band.
Still, Kennicott drags out all the oldies, the fearless iconoclasts who are going to challenge Trump in the new term. There’s D.C.-based artist Robin Bell, “who often works with nighttime projections onto public buildings, flashed words like ‘Impeach’ and ‘Arrest the President’ and ‘Experts Agree: Trump Is a Pig’ onto facades all around town, including a then Trump-owned luxury hotel in the Old Post Office building. It was, perhaps, an effort to invert the domination of Trump in the national psyche by branding his spaces with unwanted criticism.” Oh, the bravery!
There’s more, each one more pathetic than the last. In 2019, Jennifer Rubell debuted a performance piece called “Ivanka Vacuuming.” The idea was that an Ivanka Trump look-alike vacuumed crumbs off a red carpet for two hours a night. Kennicott remarks, “It was, perhaps, a commentary on the trickle-down economics of his vast tax cuts, or the ultimately failed effort of the president’s daughter and adviser to remain free of the moral taint of her father’s administration.” Then there was the Guggenheim Museum in New York, which “firmly declined a request from Trump’s White House to borrow a painting by Van Gogh, which the president and first lady wanted to hang in their private quarters.” Instead, the museum offered “America,” by artist Maurizio Cattelan, which consisted of a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet. “Much of theart world,” writes Kennicott, “including many artists who supported Kamala Harris and a substantial number of people who regularly visit museums, galleries and performance spaces, is bewildered by the reelection of Donald Trump.” You don’t say.
Missing from Kennicott’s essay is the famous Podesta art scandal. In 2016 it was revealed that the art collection of DNC officials Tony and John Podesta included works that are bizarre and arguably even evil. The Podesta’s collection contained, as critic Michael J. Pearce described it as including, “weird genetically-mutated piggy-children sculptures and creepy photographs of men with children running away.” People were “shocked to learn that this pillar of the Democratic Party owned a sculpture of a decapitated naked woman whose pose closely resembled a photo of one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims. Another installation in [Podesta’s] home included hyper-real sculpted hybrid human and pig figures, including piglet children.”
Pearce goes on: “suddenly, a powerful perception of a sick relationship between left-wing politics, avant-garde art, and pedophilia was established by media outlets covering the story.”
This stuff even offended some Democrats: “Intersectional Democratic Party members were horrified that the taste of Podesta—one of their elite leaders—could include such offensive things. Party leaders seeking the middle-class vote were appalled at the offense to bourgeois values. The sculpture of the beheaded woman clearly offended feminist factions.”
Pearce saw this as undermining liberalism as the historical champions of great, modernist art. Such art also shows how the left has become philistines:
Instead of supporting art, left-wing intersectional activists have become busy iconoclasts, calling for the destruction of a painting of Emmet Till, throwing paint at public sculptures of Columbus and Civil War monuments, spray painting slogans onto the iconic Unconditional Surrender statue in Sarasota. There’s nothing particularly new or exciting about iconoclasm, but it is unusual that the political motivation of these activists is repressive an intolerant, because supporting freedom of expression has been the default position of the American left since the Second World War.
In his book The Triumph of Modernism, the great art critic Hilton Kramer argues that when modernism emerged in the 20th century, the more conservative middle class embraced it. Housewives and normal Joes liked Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler, Edward Hopper, Odd Nerdrum, and Alex Katz. Kramer, one critic observed, “insisted upon Modernism as an essential component of bourgeois culture. He admires Modernist art and has less patience for the artworks made after Modernism, which he tends to interpret in terms of decline or degeneration.”
Contemplating Matisse’s works Kramer observed, “It is hard to believe that we shall ever again witness anything like it, now or in the foreseeable future.” Today, instead, we endure “the nihilist imperatives of the postmodernist scam.” Bingo.
Yes, average, normal Americans understand and love beautiful art. We are also, as I noted in the beginning of this essay, surrounded by it—on murals, in video games, in car design, in church. We are able, as Elon Musk, X, and the conservative media have shown, to simply become our own curators. We are free to ignore the garbage championed by Philip Kennicott and The Washington Post.
Earlier this year, I purchased one of my favorite objects of art. It’s a Carver skateboard featuring a gorgeous design from the German Bauhaus school of the early 20th century. I took the board to one of my favorite art spaces, the Glenstone Museum in Maryland—just a mile or so from where I grew up as a kid. I had art on the skateboard I was riding, art surrounding me on the grounds of Glenstone and on the walls, and I had the entire history of art available to me in the phone in my pocket. “Piss Christ”? You must be joking.
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