Why Art Doesn’t Matter
(Very much)
By Max Voss-Nester
In early December of 2010, Jeffrey Deitch, director of the Museum Of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles, decided to paint over a mural he had commissioned by the Italian street artist Blu. The mural depicted coffins draped with oversized dollar bills in lieu of flags. Deitch said of the expensive reversal: "This is 100% about my effort to be a good, responsible, respectful neighbor in this historic community,” in apparent deference to the local community. The Geffen resides in a neighborhood in downtown LA known as Little Tokyo, where many Japanese Americans make their home. In 1999, local veterans created a nearby memorial to the segregated Japanese American soldiers of World War II.
In response, a group of street artists got together one chilly Los Angeles evening and made their pointed retort to what they considered a heavy handed act of censorship. Chicano artist/Vietnam War veteran Leo Limon as well as Joey Krebs a.k.a. The Phantom Street Artist -- took turns tagging the museum wall using a handmade laser graffiti gun created for the event by artist/computer programmer Todd Moyer. They included an image of the defunct mural with the word “CENSORED” overlaid in large red letters.
So there’s the SitRep (as the vets might say). What can we make of this?
Deitch laments that the reversal was caused by a scheduling conflict that precluded a conversation between Blu and Deitch before the mural was to begin.
Board President Jeffrey Soros said "As I see it, it's an unfortunate confluence of events that led us to being in a lose-lose situation. You lose if you take the mural down, and you lose if you keep it up. Had Jeffrey been in town, he and Blu could have come to an understanding about the work."
The implication is that, had Blu presented this idea to MOCA, it would have been rejected. Politely. Quietly. This gaffe could have been avoided. The content would have still been deemed inappropriate, but perhaps more benign imagery could have been selected, and without the need for so much white paint. The relevant principle here is pragmatic, not ideological. The primary motivation of Deitch in this matter is to avoid controversy, not to empower art. But wait, he said: "Look at my gallery website — I have supported protest art more than just about any other mainstream gallery in the country." So Deitch’s walk on the safe side is predicated on his position at the MOCA, not his personal beliefs. Fair enough. It’s not his money after all; that comes from millionaires and billionaires. As Soros points out above, they were going to lose, and they had to pick a side to lose with them. They picked the side their patrons would find more politically palatable. This is unsurprising; people compromise their principles in the line of duty all the time.
My intent here is not to rip on Deitch. I might do the same thing if I were pulling down six figures to promote art. But an incident like this one can help reveal the subtle institutional machinery of such arbiters of culture like MOCA.
The work that Deitch had destroyed was certainly full of symbolic meaning, but it was by no means shocking by contemporary standards. It was a fairly polite jab at the costs of war, a subject that can be gruesome and easily sensationalized. The approach Blu took was anything but sensational though. It was a slightly anemic approach to an uncomfortable subject, executed in a diplomatic fashion, if not a universally palatable one. The fact that it was so quickly disappeared is an indicator of the socially conservative inertia that propels wealthy institutions. It is anecdotal to be sure, but a good example of a systemic tendency.
One must admit though, Deitch made the tactically advantageous choice in picking his enemies on this one. Had he left it up, the mural might have raised the ire of wealthy donors, patriotic locals, and sensitive vets alike, whereas his critics on the left were probably less intimidating. Their witty, if ineffectual retort of ‘tagging’ the now infamous white wall with pro-Blu slogans with laser light was, like Blu’s initial image: polite, benign, and easily erased. A nearby restaurant has also lent its walls to the protest, this time via the slightly more permanent medium of wheat-paste mural, depicting Deitch as an Iranian Ayatollah. Take that MOCA. Or don’t.
I’m not dumping on the protesters either. I would probably take a similar tack, producing a pointed remark, that is totally legal, and that can be politely ignored. I get to work out my rage and the museum gets to go on with business as usual. It’s that pragmatism again, this time from David instead of Goliath. No one wants to rock the boat.
This, to me is the lesson of this story. People don’t really give a shit. At least not too much of one. We are spectators in our own society. We defer to those that hold the purse strings to dispense our culture, and to create the zeitgeist that judges appropriateness. I am less interested in apportioning blame than understanding why this should be the case. What are the mechanisms involved? Could it be apathy? Laziness? Existential ennui? Prozac in the tap water?
Historically, every bit of cultural freedom we exercise has been laboriously wrested from the hands of the powerful, and then only after the oppression has become intolerable. Perhaps we need more censorship, not less, in order to light a fire under our complacent collective rump. Maybe some old fashion Nazi-style book burnings will get out the lazy liberals and conservatives alike, united under a shared banner of outrage at a system run amok. But what wealthy patron wants that? Better to make small moves lest society rise up.
Because until that critical mass is reached, we should all expect more of the same subtle pressure to eschew the confrontational and embrace the banal, to reject the unpleasant or offensive while lauding the superficial and the irrelevant. So lets all hope it gets worse, so we’re all motivated to make it better.
Bibliography:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/moca-whitewashes-blu-mural.html
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/much-attention-has-been-paid-to-the-street-art-communitys-reaction-to-jeffrey-deitchs-decision-to-remove-blus-mural-from-moca.html
http://www.deitch.com/index.php
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/12/anonymous-street-artist-puts-up-mural-condemning-jeffrey-deitch.html
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-moca-mural-20101215,0,6698582.story
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2011/01/street-artists-protest-moca-geffen-contemporary-blu.html
