PUBIC ART
Contemporary Public Art Isn’t Just Bad; It’s Obscene
“Ugliness is in a way superior to beauty because it lasts,” declared the famously hideous Serge Gainsbourg.
Let’s hope not.
This week, a massive sculpture honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. was erected in Boston. Literally. Inspired by an old snapshot of Dr. King hugging his long-suffering wife, the $10 million dollar bronze behemoth depicts two pairs of disembodied, headless, faceless, bodiless arms, hugging nothing.
As with so much public art—or shall we say, pubic art—these days, “The Embrace” is obscenely, even pornographically, suggestive from almost every angle. It’s unclear if this was done intentionally. Perhaps it’s a nod to Dr. King’s not-quite-I-have-a-dreamy history with women.
Yes, Dr. King was renown for his skilled oral delivery, but this is a little on the nose:
I mean, we know he had a huge and weighty legacy, but this seems a bit literal:
It’s called the National Endowment for the Arts for a reason I guess.
In The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers mercilessly mock the contemporary art world with Maud’s ridiculous genitalia-themed performance art. “My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal,” she boasts.
No one’s laughing at you now, Maudie.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH PUBLIC ART
Replacement theory is a baseless Qanon conspiracy theory. In unrelated news, lots of old public sculptures erected before the civil rights movement are getting torn down and replaced with works that are not so much art as they are focus-grouped corporate displays of our total cultural surrender—and aesthetic exhaustion.
To help erase the memory of our problematic public statuary, an array of new sculptures are going up outside every courthouse, outhouse, henhouse, and longhouse in America.
You can no longer stroll onto a university campus, approach a lonely windswept corporate plaza, or dodge unmedicated feces-smeared psychotics on your way into the subway without encountering a gleaming eyesore daring you not to laugh.
Whatever you do, do not roll your eyes at these sculptures! Facial recognition software is watching. Any derisive expressions are punishable with a fine or prison.
But if you’re a big city dweller in an advanced first-world nation, you are used to ignoring terrible art in public spaces.
Richard Serra’s 1981 Tilted Arc was a 12-foot-tall, 120-foot-long, 15-ton steel slab in front of New York City’s Javitz Center. It bisected a giant plaza, thereby forcing overweight federal employees to walk all the way around it to get to work on time. Maybe it was originally intended as a government weight loss program.
It ended up causing such distress that the government tore it down in 1989. Serra sued the city claiming his free speech rights had been violated, and there was even a ludicrous trial.
Serra saw his work as “as a way to expose and criticize the surrounding public space, not to beautify it.” At least he was honest about his intentions. The New York Times art critic agreed with him, calling it “an awkward, bullying piece that may conceivably be the ugliest outdoor work of art in the city.”
Your visceral disgust, as Serra himself admits, is a feature of contemporary public art, not a bug.
The art wants you to hate it!
Don’t get me started on Christo, who liked to wrap incredibly big and inconvenient objects like islands and the German Reichstag in fabric. Imagine what the sustainability people would say now about this incredible waste of fabric. It’s almost enough to make a whole pair of paints for Lizzo!
Am I supposed to be impressed by this? If he were alive today, I’d invite Christo over on Christmas Eve and force him to wrap all my children’s gifts, including a bicycle, a Barbie Dream house, and a basketball, with nothing but two pieces of Scotch tape, the kind of cheap wrapping paper that tears as soon as you touch it, and a dull scissors.
Christo had it easy.
A German friend once gave me a square bit of the silvery fabric from the Reichstag as if it was a relic of a holy saint. I tossed it in the trash.
ART THAT WANTS YOU TO HATE IT
Expensive multi-million dollar “installations'' commissioned by high-minded, low-IQ, semi-literate civic officials are all we have now. They are “installed” in your public spaces, the way a sewage pipe is installed. The large-scale contemporary “art” they install means nothing, has no purpose, and creates only one thing: a crushing sense of defeat in anyone forced to see it. “We gave up on life. Now it’s your turn.”
The larger the piece, the more blatant its mockery of the sacred duty of traditional heroic art. It knows its job is to inspire awe and wonder, and by rejecting this, it sadistically refuses to give the unwashed normies what they crave.
It mocks you by actively shunning your sentimental longing for something of transportive beauty; it is coated in a slick, impenetrable force field of shallow nihilism, and any attempt by you, a pathetic, hopeless rube to graft significance or historical import onto it, will be sloughed off like the pigeon shit it rapidly accumulates.
“I hate this but I am not allowed to say so or I will be mocked.” The emperor has no clothes, and even the emperor knows it, but by now we are inured to his obscene morbid bronze flesh and simply shuffle along on our way to the F train, as he parades along next to us making ever more grotesque gestures to the public.
Contemporary public art is almost without exception art that rejects meaning and emotion—brutally. “You will gaze upon me and you will feel nothing. You will feel nothing and you will be happy,” the vapid grotesquerie screams at you.
They don’t get that this produces colossal catastrophes that are immature and emotionally stunted; autistic even.
Why do globalists love hideous public art so much? Osama Bin Laden (or Bush, or the CIA, insert your favorite villain here) did us all a favor on 9/11 when he damaged Fritz Koenig’s comically ugly “Sphere,” the hideous monumental neofuturist globe from 1971 that used to sit in front of the old WTC.
A lot of good that globe did us. In a small way, that globe in all its ugly globalist UN-inspired glory, and the ideas behind it, may have helped trigger the eventual collapse of the buildings behind it.
EURO TRASH
While American boomers were still trying to design faux classical fountains outside their museums, the Europeans were modernizing, staying relevant, and projecting their refined, cutting-edge sensibilities onto the public.
They would never be so gauche as to erect a classical nude. Please. Instead, Europe leaned into deconstructionism—and artistic suicide.
Europe, our cultural motherland, is weathering a total and complete cultural crisis, and there is no end in sight. But at least we can warm our hands on the pyre of their national artistic pride!
I do sort of like the Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris; it has a certain charming ‘80s zaniness, but let’s face it, it’s mime-level sculpture:
In 2014, Paris also hosted Paul McCarthy’s monumental “Tree” at the Place Vendome, right outside the Ritz Hotel. He called it a tree, but I think we all know what this is:
McCarthy, who once filmed himself inserting a Barbie doll into his anus in front of a classroom of students at UC San Diego, also gave the fortunate residents of Rotterdam a sculpture he called “Santa Claus.”
Or as the people called it, Butt Plug Gnome:
SEMINAL ART
If you ever studied contemporary 20th century art, you may be familiar with performance “artist” Vito Acconci’s infamous 1972 piece, “Seedbed.”
In it, Vito, a rumpled, comically bedraggled little troll, spent eight hours each day laying in a crawl space under the floor of an art gallery masturbating while visitors walked around above him. He narrated his subterranean bisexual sexual fantasies into a mic that was broadcast live to his visitors as he abused himself. Later, photos and even graphic video of him “creating art” were displayed at the Tate and the Met.
Without irony, the Met website describes it as a “seminal piece.”
You can draw a direct line from “Seedbed” to the notorious Barack Obama oil portrait. Obama’s handpicked artist, Kehinde Wiley, an openly gay man reported to have Weinsteined the young black male models he picked up off the streets, is famous for inserting sexual iconography into his paintings.
“In a 2015 interview with CBS News, Wiley stated that he often added sperm cells inside paintings to ‘take masculinity and all of its bravado down to its most essential component. His Alexander the Great variation features a background full of sperm cells.’”
Detail from a Kehinde Wiley painting:
Detail from the Presidential Portrait:
In 2019, Kehinde Wiley blessed New York City with this monumental figure, complete with manboobs:
“Kehinde Wiley Subverts Confederate Monuments with First Public Sculpture in Times Square,” the critics squealed. “Entitled ‘Rumors of War’ the towering, 28-foot-tall bronze equestrian statue portrays a young Black man rocking Nike sneakers and a hoodie.”
We will be paying the Wages of Floyd for the foreseeable future as large-scale commissions awarded in 2020 are only now being unveiled. Reparation Art, you might call it.
In 2020, the University of Pennsylvania, home to Joe Biden’s pilfered classified documents, swiftly installed this giant statue of a blind pineapple at the main entrance to its campus in an attempt to appease its militant black student body:
It didn’t work, naturally. “There is still so much work to be done,” Black Student League President Kristen Ukeomah said. “The statue does not rectify all of Penn’s harm.”
Am I allowed to ask Kristen why in the world she would attend a university so “harmful” to her? No? Okay, never mind.
The only reason we even have such a thing as monumental public works in modern times is because ancient people, of an advanced intelligence and confidence that dwarfs our own, understood the raw power of huge manmade figures of metal or stone. The Colossus of Rhodes was a 100-foot tall football spike mocking the enemies they defeated in war. Napoleon understood this lesson; he littered Paris with spectacular monuments to his victories.
What will future generations say about us when they see our great works of art? These giant hunks of metal can’t be burned or deleted; like Serge said, ugliness lasts.
Dynamite the concrete. Melt the bronze. Smelt the iron. It’s been done before. We need to shut down political pubic art until we can figure out what the hell is going on.
If we don’t, we are going to get 50-foot tall bronze neo-vaginas dilating themselves in Times Square.
You have been warned.
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Gratefully yours,
Peachy
Western Civilization's collapse can be traced through its art, that's for sure.
I think a good deal of it is elitism as well. The most common of common laborer's can appreciate the works of Rembrandt or Michelangelo, but it takes a "first-rate" mind to marvel at the genius of Pollack's paint drippings, Rothko's color swatches, or Twombly's scribblings.
Refrigeration, air conditioning, foreign travel--things that once separated the elite from the hoi polloi--are now available to all. Admiring modern art is a marker of one's elite status.
Upon reflection, The Great Reset--which plans on stripping most in the West of the aforementioned amenities of modern life--might bring about a renewal in art since the elites, having maintained their conveniences and freedoms, could stop pretending that they enjoy these monstrosities and fund artists with talent. That is, if there are any artists around who did not inject themselves with poison...
Well, I suppose even artists are phallible.
"Let them eat (urinal) cake!"