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.
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