"The Good Soldier Schweik." Illustration of the soldier Joseph Schweik by Czech artist Josef Lada. 1923.

A rare presentation of Robert Kurka’s opera, The Good Soldier Schweik, was offered to audiences in Southern California by the Long Beach Opera at the Center Theater in Long Beach on Jan. 23, 2010, and at Barnum Hall in Santa Monica on Jan. 30, 2010. Based on the 1923 antiwar novel by Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek, the opera is scarcely known in the United States and has been infrequently performed since it first premiered in 1958.

I attended the performance in Santa Monica, California and offer this article as a review, but I also wish to familiarize readers with the history of the Schweik tale since it was first published eighty-seven-years ago.

The confluence of talents, historic events, and political lessons embodied in Schweik is nothing less than astounding. While Hašek’s story took place during the First World War – “the War to end all Wars” – the work has continued to resonate throughout the decades. It is especially pertinent now that President Obama is fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

I commend Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of the Long Beach Opera company, for staging a boldly anti-militarist production during a time of war. In the Long Beach Opera’s program guide for Schweik, Mitisek states: “The story of Schweik has lost none of its original bite and sarcasm. Seeing it today, you get the sense that we’ve learned some things about war – but not a lot.” It is regrettable that after all the effort the company put into mounting Kurka’s Schweik, only two performances were given. The work deserves a longer run, and hopefully the Long Beach Opera’s efforts will give rise to renewed interest in Kurka’s magnum opus.

Mark Bringelson (left: playing Sergeant Vanek) and Mathew DiBattista (playing Joseph Schweik), perform in the Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" on Jan. 30, 2010. Photo by Mark Vallen ©

Of Czech descent, Robert Kurka (1921-1957) was born just outside of Chicago, Illinois. Mostly self-taught when it came to music composition, he nevertheless had a burgeoning career in the field due to his extraordinary talent.

After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951 and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1952, he made up his mind that same year to compose an opera based on Hašek’s antiwar novel. Why exactly he chose to do so is unknown, but whatever the reason for his decision he picked an inopportune moment in history for his endeavor. The United States began fighting the Korean War on June 25, 1950, a bloody conflict that would end in stalemate on July 17, 1953. It should go without saying that the powers that be in the U.S. were in no mood for pacifist messages in art, not only that, but American society was in the throes of the frenzied anticommunism of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Set in that context, Kurka’s resolve to write an antiwar opera can be considered an act of defiance.

As work proceeded on his opera Kurka was stricken with leukemia. He continued to labor at his composition, fashioning a brilliant modernist fusion of folk, jazz, and classical idioms. His score was created for a small orchestra without strings, focusing exclusively on percussion, brass, and wind instruments in order to produce a sound evocative of marching rhythms and martial music. The opera shared much with the theatrical works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht – especially with their magnificent proletarian opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Kurka developed a musical language that described the absurdity of war as expressed in Hašek’s original antiwar novel, and he was just able to finish the opera when he died of his illness on December 12, 1957, ten days before his 36th birthday. Only months after Kurka’s tragic death, The Good Soldier Schweik premiered at the New York City Opera in April 1958.

In Act II – Scene 1 of the opera, a member of the ruling class, the Baroness Von Botzenheim, visits a military field hospital to "comfort" soldiers on their way to be slaughtered at the front. Bringing gifts of sausages and candies, she sings: "Brave soldiers, going off to war, day and night, night and day. While you fight, we will pray. God knows what you’re fighting for." Mezzo-soprano Peabody Southwell played the Baroness in the Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" on Jan. 30, 2010. Photo by Mark Vallen ©

Following the overture of The Good Soldier Schweik, the opera’s prologue commences with the appearance of “A Gentleman of the Kingdom of Bohemia,” a dandy in a bowler hat who proclaims that “Great times call for great men.” He continues his narrative by telling the audience that “modest, unrecognized heroes without Napoleon’s glory” exist, men and women who are “Greater than Alexander the Great.” He speaks of “a common man, the kind it’s easy to like,” introducing “a very plain fellow called Schweik.” With the opera’s egalitarian tone set, the black comedy farce unfolds.

Kurka had picked Abel Meeropol (1903-1986) to write the libretto for his opera, and Meeropol produced a witty and sometimes devastating libretto. He was Jewish and a teacher in New York City, but he was also a skilled writer of poems and songs. Troubled that anti-semitism would prevent his advancement in the field of writing, he published his works under the pseudonym of “Lewis Allan.” Meeropol had a second reason for using a nom de plume; he was a member of the American Communist Party. In 1937 he wrote the words and music to a hauntingly poetic song he titled Strange Fruit, a work that protested the lynching of African-Americans in the Southern United States. By 1939 the Blues singer Billie Holiday recorded the song, and her record reached No. 16 on the American music charts. Strange Fruit is still considered to be a signature work for Holiday.

In 1941 Meeropol was made to appear before the anti-communist Rapp-Coudert Committee (1940-1942), a precursor to the anti-communist campaigns waged in the 1950s by Joe McCarthy and HUAC. Headed by Senators Herbert Rapp and Frederic Coudert, the committee conducted “investigations” into the presence of communists in the public schools of New York. As a result of the witch hunt, dozens of teachers were dismissed and had their reputations ruined. Meeropol was questioned as to whether or not the American Communist Party ordered him to write Strange Fruit, but he escaped further badgering from the committee when he answered that the party had nothing to do with the writing of the song.

In 1950 the U.S. government charged Julius and Ethel Rosenberg with attempting to pass nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. The couple were tried and convicted of the charges and sentenced to death. During this period, anti-communism in the U.S. reached a fever pitch, and it must be noted that Kurka was working on his opera in the middle of all of this. On June 19, 1953, the Rosenbergs were executed by electric chair, leaving their little boys Michael and Robert orphaned. Abel Meeropol and his wife Anne would adopt the boys. In a March 2009 interview with Robert Meeropol, Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead wrote: “It seems hard for us to understand, but the paranoia of the McCarthy era was such that many people – even family members – were terrified of being connected with the Rosenberg children, and many people who might have cared for them were too afraid to do so. After he and his wife had adopted the boys, says Meeropol, Abel didn’t get any work as a writer throughout most of the 1950s. ‘I can’t say he was blacklisted, but it definitely looks as though he was at least greylisted.’” There is little doubt that U.S. authorities kept an eye on Abel Meeropol, and that Kurka fell under suspicion for working with him.

Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek as a member of the Soviet Red Army in 1920. Hašek was attached to the political department of the 5th army, where he worked on the Red Army newspaper.

To fully appreciate Kurka’s opera it is necessary to have some understanding of author Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) and his satiric novel, The Good Soldier Schweik (also spelled Schwejk or Švejk), one of the greatest antiwar books of all time. In the story Hašek detailed the life and times of his fictional character, the rotund and mild-mannered Joseph Schweik, who is inducted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to fight against the Allied Powers in World War I (1914-1918). An enthusiastic patriot, Schweik is also a lumbering idiot who, in his zealotry to carry out the orders of his superiors, succeeds only in creating havoc. But one is never certain if Schweik’s ineptness reveals his true nature or if it is clever posturing as a means of self-preservation. Whatever the case, his foul-ups keep him from reaching the war’s blood-spattered frontline, until the story’s ending, when he finally arrives at the front but disappears without a trace while on patrol.

A colorful character, as a young man Hašek was an anarchist militant before he became completely engrossed in his writing. At the outbreak of WWI the wild bohemian, writer, and radical anarchist found himself inducted into the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and sent to the frontline trenches to fight against the Allied Powers; it is not hard to see that The Good Soldier story was to some degree autobiographical. While he had already invented his Schweik character and had previously written stories about him, it was during the travails of war that Hašek began to “flesh out” the character; transforming him into a good-natured buffoon that became a menace to the forces of militarism.

In 1915 Hašek was captured by the Russians and placed in a prisoner of war camp before his captors decided to employ him as a propagandist. When the Russian monarchy and its army collapsed with the 1917 Soviet revolution, Hašek joined the Bolsheviks, becoming a political commissar in the Red Army. Hašek’s allegiance to communism proved as tenuous as his loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and after some years of living in the Soviet Union he returned to Prague in 1920, throwing himself in earnest into the completion of his Schweik novel.

Heavy drinking and ill-health overtook Hašek, who struggled to finish his masterwork. He became so sick that he stopped writing altogether, dictating to assistants the final chapters of Schweik from his sickbed. He died of tuberculosis on January 3, 1923, at the age of 40; it was said that he had completed some 1,500 literary works during his lifetime – but alas Schweik would not be one of them. Hašek had planned on Schweik running six volumes in length, but he had only created three volumes when he died (a forth was published posthumously). His old friend Josef Lada created marvelous illustrations for all the volumes, and it is his artworks that defined the bumbling good soldier. Years after his death Hašek came to be accepted as one of the most important of all Czech writers, and The Good Soldier Schweik – having been translated into 60 languages – is still the most well known work of fiction by a Czech author.

Stage design for Piscator’s 1928 production of "The Good Soldier Schweik," showing backdrop projected images by George Grosz.

I first learned of Hašek’s masterpiece years ago through my studies of the German Expressionist movement of the late 1920s. Because of its disdain for militarism the Schweik novel was appreciated by broad sectors of the German public, who had been impoverished and exhausted by WWI. The intelligentsia embraced the story for its pacifism and defiance of conservative social order. In 1928 Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), the German Marxist director and producer of political theater during the years of the Weimar Republic, developed a landmark stage adaptation of The Good Soldier Schweik that he presented at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in Berlin.

Drawing by George Grosz for "Hintergrund: 17 Zeichnungen zur Aufführung des Schwejk in der Piscator-Bühne" (Background: 17 designs for the performance of the Schweik in the Piscator stage). Published in 1928 by the Malik-Verlag Berlin publishing house, this portfolio contains reproductions of 17 drawings created by Grosz as stage background images for the stage play, "The Good Soldier Schweik." This particular image was the portfolio’s title page.

Piscator commissioned prominent playwright Hans Reimann (1889-1969) to write the play’s script, and Bertolt Brecht assisted in writing the adaptation. Edmund Meisel (1894-1930) who just three years earlier had scored the music for Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, was commissioned to compose the music. The character of Schweik was played by the famed actor Max Pallenberg. Artist George Grosz created the stage backgrounds for the play, making hundreds of pen and ink drawings for the production. His drawings were made into an animated film that was back-projected onto the stage to coincide with the play’s action – a groundbreaking theatrical technique common to Piscator’s productions. The Long Beach Opera utilized Piscator’s idea of projected images, but its choice of images was much less effective.

"Schweik: The Actor Max Pallenberg." George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. Grosz created this portrait of the Opera’s leading man playing the part of Schweik. This drawing was plate no. 1 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio, and was titled, "Beg to report, Sir, I am an idiot."

Piscator’s theories concerning what he called “epic theater” transformed the stage presenting Schweik into a motorized “arena for battling ideas,” in fact mechanized treadmills moved actors about on stage – in one scene allowing actors dressed as soldiers to march off to war without actually moving.

The intent behind Piscator’s theatrical work was to prevent audiences from losing themselves in the illusion of theater, instead making them focus on socio-political ideas. The young Bertolt Brecht would be inspired by Piscator’s ideas, making them his own.

The Schweik production included projected still photographs on the stage and auditorium walls – news headlines and text, as well as projections of motion picture films (Grosz’s animation, footage of war, and the like).

The projections were combined with other theatrical devices: audio recordings and electronic sounds, actors emerging from the audience, and giant military maps as stage scenery. Grosz wrote the following regarding his role in the Piscator production:

“It is a fact that here Erwin has created a great new area for the graphic artists to work in, a veritable graphic arena, more tempting for graphic artists of today than all that stuffy aesthetic business or the hawking around of drawings in bibliophile editions for educated nobs. Here’s a chance for our often quoted latter-day Daumiers to paint their gloomy prophecies on the walls. What a medium, though, for the artist who wants to speak to the masses, purely and simply.

Naturally a new area requires new techniques, a new clear and concise language of graphic style – certainly a great opportunity for teaching discipline to the muddleheaded and confused! And there’s nothing to be achieved with your careless impressionist brush, either. The line must be cinematographic – clear, simple, but not too thin, because of over-exposure; furthermore it must be hard, something like the drawings and woodcuts in Gothic block books, or the massive stone carvings on the pyramids.”

"Kein schoner Tod." (Not a Nice Way of Dying). George Grosz. Black chalk. 1927. Plate no. 12 in the Hintergrund portfolio, this drawing also appeared in another portfolio of prints by Grosz titled, Die Gezeichneten (The Designated). In that portfolio the print had the title of "Mir ist der Krieg wie eine Badekur bekommen" (The War Did Me a Lot of Good, Like a Spa).

Grosz’s projected drawings helped to move the drama along by emphasizing aspects of the Schweik tale, but the artworks also transcended the story, becoming universal in their condemnation of war and its causes. The audience could see that Grosz was criticizing the renewed warlike direction of Germany’s ruling class, and if his projected images were not unsettling enough, Grosz would up the ante by publishing a number of the drawings in book form.

He collaborated with Wieland Herzfelde (founder of the Malik-Verlag Berlin publishing house and also the brother of well-known artist John Heartfield), in issuing a portfolio of reproductions titled, Background: 17 designs for the performance of the Schweik in the Piscator stage. The publication of the book caused a major uproar; what had been ephemeral projections could now be held in the hands of increasingly powerful critics.

Three drawings from the portfolio, Shut up and soldier on!, Bow to the Authorities, and The pouring out of the Holy Spirit, led to a right-wing campaign against Grosz and Herzfelde that resulted in the authorities charging the two with blasphemy and placing them on trial in 1928; it turned out to be one of the longest running and closely watched blasphemy trials in history.

The essence of Grosz’s drawing, The pouring out of the Holy Spirit, would be preserved by Meeropol in his libretto for Kurka’s opera in Act II, Scene Two, “Okay, let’s pray!”. In attempting to explain his Shut up and soldier on! drawing to a judge, Grosz said the following:

“This drawing was created as a cover on the book about Schweik. In one of the chapters there’s the following scene – I’ll give you the gist, because I can’t remember it exactly. Well, there are these two soldiers lying on a bed in a cell, I think, and they’re telling each other stories about their war experiences. They grumble about the war. One says to the other something like: Well, shut up and soldier on. As I read this account the drawing took shape in my imagination. I imagined that Christ might come now… They would grab him, hand him a gas mask, put him into army boots, in short, they wouldn’t understand him at all.” [Taken from notes of the blasphemy trial, published in Das Tagebuch, 1928].

"Maul halten und weiter dienen." (Shut up and soldier on!) George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1928. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde (brother of John Heartfield) were accused and tried on blasphemy charges for this drawing, which originally served as a backdrop image in the Opera, "The Good Soldier Schweik," but was later published in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

After numerous trials and retrials, Grosz and Hezfelde were acquitted in 1931, but the Schweik drawings and their printing plates were confiscated by the court and destroyed. The social forces of the burgeoning Nazi movement had scored a major victory. When Hitler came to power two years later, The Good Soldier Schweik became one of the many thousands of books destroyed during the massive public book-burnings organized by the Nazi party on May 10, 1933. Hašek’s book was burned because it was considered “pacifist literature,” but books by “Marxists,” “liberals,” “Jews,” and anyone considered to be “un-German” were thrown onto the bonfires as well. Books by Piscator, Brecht, Grosz, and Herzfelde were also added to what the Nazis called the “funeral pyre of the intellect.”

"Die Obrigkeit." (The Authorities). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. This print had the subtitle of: "Seid untertan der Obrigkeit" (Bow to the Authorities). Plate no. 2 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde were tried for blasphemy because of this drawing.

To escape Nazi persecution Grosz would flee to the U.S. in 1932. Herzfelde went underground soon after, finally escaping to Prague in 1933. Working on a film in the Soviet Union in 1933, Piscator found himself in exile when Hitler came to power. He became disillusioned with the Soviet Union under the leadership of Stalin and by 1936 he move to France, finally emigrating to the U.S. in 1939.

Piscator was invited to found a Dramatic Workshop at New York’s The New School, where his students included Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Tony Curtis, Shelley Winters, and many others. Ironically, the anti-communist hysteria of McCarthyism drove Piscator from America. His associate and fellow exile in the U.S., Bertolt Brecht, was hauled up before HUAC on October 30, 1947, and harshly interrogated regarding his political sympathies. The next day Brecht left the U.S. for Europe. Piscator did not wait to receive his subpoena, he returned to West Germany in 1951 to avoid the witch-hunts.

"Ausschuttung des heiligen Geistes." (The pouring out of the Holy Spirit). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1928. Grosz and Wieland Herzfelde were tried for blasphemy because of this drawing. Plate no. 9 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

Piscator’s technical ideas regarding the staging of the Schweik play clearly have had an influence on theatre and opera over the decades. His concepts like projected backdrops, stage hands incorporated into the action as they shuffled props on and off stage, and actors performing in the aisles amongst the audience, were incorporated into the Long Beach Opera production. However, Piscator meant to provoke his audience into taking sides against war and those who profit from it, while the Long Beach Opera placed its emphasis on entertainment.

Given the profundity of Kurka’s material it would be impossible not to impart some level of political insight, and such moments were plentiful in the Long Beach Opera production. In Act I – Scene Four, Schweik finds himself in a cell at police headquarters after having been arrested for allegedly speaking against the Emperor. Many others are also in the jail for the very same offense, and all are worried about being brutalized and tortured at the hands of the police. Schweik, assuring his fellow jailbirds that things are not so bad, sings:

“I once read in a book where it said, you had to dance on red-hot iron and drink molten lead. You were shot or hanged, burned or slaughtered, and as a special event, drawn and quartered. They split you open or chopped your head, you might be innocent but you were also dead. There’s no quartering here or things of that kind, it’s improved for our benefit I’m glad to find. We’ve got a mattress, a table, a seat, they bring us soup and water and bread to eat, the slop pot is right there under your nose, a lot of progress is what it shows.”

"Der Lebensbaum." (Tree of Life). George Grosz. Brush and ink. 1927. Executed men hang from a tree made of the "§" symbol used to denote German legal articles. No. 4 in the "Hintergrund" portfolio.

As with a number of scenes in the opera, the action in Scene Four transcends the period setting of 1914, in fact it is hard not to think of the present when hearing about the “progress” made in the handling of prisoners held by certain governments. Surely waterboarding is an improvement over being drawn and quartered – yes, a lot of progress is what it shows!

The ending scenes of the Long Beach Opera production could hardly have concluded on a more profound note. In Act II – Scene Seven, the character of Schweik at last finds himself at the front. On the stage backdrop a gigantic image is projected, a terrible scene of utter desolation; shattered and blackened skeletal trees and bomb craters cast in blue light. From behind the stage backdrop the orchestra begins the somber music for the song, “Wait for the ragged soldiers.” Groups of wounded troops walk onto the stage – collapsing, exhausted, dying, as they sing their foreboding song:

“Wait for the ragged soldiers, watch for the ragged men with their sunken faces, holding their blood-red wounds with their hands. No sound of drums when they come, no trumpets blow when they come, no flags at the gate. Wait for the ragged soldiers. Wait…wait and watch for the ragged, watch for the tired men marching slowly homeward. Men… homeward. (….) Coat sleeves armless, legless, sightless. Angry, angry, angry men, angry men. No sound of drums when they come, No!”

Act II – Scene 7. Joseph Schweik and Sergeant Vanek at the bomb blasted battle front. A group of wounded soldiers trudge by, collapsing one by one into muddy trenches as they sing: "Wait for the ragged soldiers." Photo of the Jan. 30, 2010, Long Beach Opera production of "The Good Soldier Schweik" taken by Mark Vallen ©

Patrolling the battlefield, Schweik and Sergeant Vanek enter the scene carrying their guns; here the production has been updated to good effect.

Rather than carrying WWI era bolt action rifles, the two soldiers are armed with modern automatic assault rifles, reminders that the sentiments of this opera are not rooted in the past, but relevant and applicable to the world as it is today.

Lost in the landscape of mangled barbed-wire and stinking corpses, Schweik and Vanek argue over which direction to take. Vanek insists that his military map indicates a right turn, Schweik shrugs and says, “Maps are sometimes wrong.” The two cannot agree on how to advance, so they part, going separate ways.

Schweik watches the Sergeant disappear into the blackened wasteland of destruction, waves goodbye, and lays down his gun. As the character of Schweik begins to walk off stage, he sings: “I’ll take a quiet road where forget-me-nots grow, along a clear stream where soft breezes blow. I’ll take it easy for the rest of the day and pick some meadow flowers on the way. I’ll take a quiet road and I’ll lie in the sun, for birds and butterflies, I won’t need my gun.” His song over, Schweik vanishes.

In the opera’s epilogue the gentleman of Bohemia returns, stepping out of the darkness and into a spotlight to find Schweik’s abandoned gun. The gentleman sings the opera’s final words: “Schweik, Schweik, where did he go? He just disappeared and that’s all we know. Some say they saw him at a much later day, sipping a drink at a little café. And others will swear he was seen on the street, and lost in the crowd before they could meet. Schweik, Schweik, the Good Soldier Schweik, the kind of fellow that fellow men like. In one place or other he’s sure to be found. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s somewhere around.”

[ More information on Robert Kurka’s opera, The Good Soldier Schweik: Song lyrics and a synopsis of the opera’s storyline, can be found on the Cedille Records website in .pdf format. An excellent recording of the opera performed by the Chicago Opera Theater and released by Cedille Records can be purchased from Amazon, where you can also hear song excerpts. An English language edition of Jaroslav Hašek’s Schweik novel, with illustrations by Josef Lada can also be purchased on Amazon.]

Detail of Sandro Botticelli’s 1482-1486 tempera on canvas painting, "Birth of Venus" (La Nascita di Venere), as used in the opening of "Why Beauty Matters."

In November of 2009 the BBC network in the UK ran The Modern Beauty Season, a series of films produced for television on the concept of beauty in modern art. The series offered six films that ran the gambit of opinion on contemporary art, but it is the film by the British philosopher Roger Scruton, Why Beauty Matters, that I wish to address here.

As a working artist I found myself in general agreement with some points made in Scruton’s film; that appreciating and creating things of beauty is a necessary part of the human experience, that beauty is “a value as important as truth and goodness,” that it has been central to civilization, and that “it is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings.” We agree that there is a spiritual aspect to beauty - though we would likely disagree over a definition of “spiritual.” So yes, beauty does indeed matter, and I am of the opinion that it should be central in all the various disciplines of the arts; but perhaps my definition of such an elusive and ephemeral thing as beauty is more expansive than Mr. Scruton’s, whose vision seems to be restricted to what is known as European “classicism.” I am at variance with a number of his assumptions and inferences; the particulars of my differences are in part laid out in this article.

Postmodern art makes for an easy target, as it is has altogether forsaken skill, craft, and beauty - the very things most people think of when considering the arts. Postmodern artists from the late 1960s to the early 1970s attempted to remove art from the marketplace by creating “conceptual” works, i.e., performance, video, installation, etc., instead of merchandise for market consumption. We have seen how well that worked out. The art movement that previously strove for the “dematerialization of the art object,” as pro-conceptualist art critic and activist Lucy Lippard put it in 1973, has today placed itself in unwavering service to the elite art establishment it once sought to circumvent. Capitalism co-opted and absorbed conceptual art, which has become more of a commodity fetish than any of its other art world predecessors; it is synonymous with astronomical prices, billionaire art collectors, and shamelessly venal celebrity art stars - all good enough reasons to disparage it in my view. But that is my critique, not Roger Scruton’s.

"Zuerst die Füsse" (Feet First) Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997). Painted wood sculpture created in 1990. Shown in "Why Beauty Matters."

In Why Beauty Matters the soft-spoken and erudite Scruton makes a populist argument against much of contemporary art that will no doubt strike a chord with significant numbers of people. But seeing as how the general public is largely indifferent to the goings-on of the art world, Scruton’s presentation provides surprisingly little insight into the field of art, instead he sets up a straw man, fueling the fires of misunderstanding by focusing on the more egregious examples of postmodern excess (for instance, Turner Prize winner Martin Creed’s Sick Film Work 610), then suggesting that liberal elites, moral dissipation, and the loss of religion are the reasons behind such works being produced. What I find interesting is that Scruton does not explicitly state such opinion in his film, he alludes to it - but he reveals his stance with more clarity and honesty in his writings. For example, in a 2006 essay titled Quo vadis? (Latin for, “Where are you going?”) he uncategorically declared his position:

“We cannot rescue our civilization merely by overthrowing the Marxist, post-Marxist, deconstructionist and postmodern ideologies that inhabit the universities. Even if we returned to the classical curriculum, and taught European culture as it was taught to me, that would not bring back the public consensus on which our civilization depends. (….) The most important thing on which European people can be encouraged to agree is that our inheritance is Judaeo-Christian, and that the Bible, and the two religions built on it, are an indispensable part of our culture.”

There are moments in Why Beauty Matters where Scruton sounds like a critic of the capitalist culture industry, as in the following comment;

“Our consumer society puts usefulness first, and beauty is no better than a side-effect. Since art is useless it doesn’t matter what you read, what you look at, what you listen to. We are besieged by messages on every side, titillated - tempted by appetite - never addressed, and that is one reason why beauty is disappearing from our world. ‘Getting and spending’ wrote Wordsworth ‘we lay waste our powers.’ In our culture today the advert is more important than the work of art, and artworks often try to capture our attention as adverts do, by being brash or outrageous. (….) Like adverts, today’s works of art aim to create a brand - even if they have no product to sell, except themselves.”

On the surface level Scruton’s remarks may have a ring of truth to them, but ultimately his critique boils down to right-wing populism, never attributing the crisis in modern art to the pernicious role of money - as did Robert Hughes in his fabulous The Mona Lisa Curse - but to liberalism and the waning influence of religion in the West. Why Beauty Matters is very nearly ahistorical in its presentation.

Detail of the marble sculpture, "Ecstasy of St. Teresa," by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). An outstanding architect and perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 17th century, Bernini originated the Baroque style of sculpture - of which his "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" (created 1647-52) is a primary example. Screen capture from "Why Beauty Matters."

While Scruton points out how certain philosophers of old influenced the world of European art, and he briefly makes mention of the substantial impact science had upon the arts, he never once mentions the central issue of patronage - a deciding factor in art history. In the film Scruton takes an almost mystical approach in describing how spirituality and religion have historically been linked to concepts of beauty, while completely ignoring the role of the Church as the primary financial backer and authority in the arts. Likewise, he ignores the role of monarchists and other ruling elites, who also tightly controlled art by way of patronage. Artists did not begin to free themselves of this rigid control until the early 19th century.

In one of his recently published articles, Beauty and Desecration, Scruton wrote that “Modern artists like Otto Dix too often wallow in the base and the loveless.” That observation reveals much about Scruton, and how the two of us have divergent concepts of what is beautiful. Dix lived through one of the most tumultuous periods of German history. He fought in the trenches of World War I where he saw humanity ripped to shreds in the world’s first mechanized war. At war’s end he became politicized, and through his art expressed disdain for militarism and Germany’s ruling class. He witnessed the fall of the German monarchy, the rise of the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi seizure of power. In their brutal repression of the arts, the Nazis removed Dix from the Prussian Academy and his professorship at the Dresden Art Academy - his dismissal letter declaring that his art “threatened to sap the will of the German people to defend themselves.”

"Lady with Mink and Veil" - Otto Dix. Oil on Linen. 1920. Dix painted this portrait of an old war widow forced to turn to prostitution in order to survive.

Dix was forbidden to exhibit by the Nazis, they removed his artworks from museums and had them destroyed. They included his paintings in their infamous 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibit, meant to condemn modern art as the work of Bolsheviks, “Jews,” and the insane. Dix was forcibly conscripted into the fascist home guard in 1945 at the age of 53, captured and later released by the French army at the close of the war. Given that chronicle, it is shocking that Scruton would accuse Dix of wallowing in the “loveless.” What type of art would Scruton have preferred to see Dix paint during that despairing period - inoffensive still lifes? Considering the barbarity that was all around him, it is remarkable that Dix painted anything at all, but even the most distorted of his expressionist grotesqueries contained more truth, and yes, beauty - than all the realistic classical nudes and respectable portraits commissioned by the German bourgeoisie of the period. Dix’s creations were beautiful, simply by virtue of the truths they told.

In Why Beauty Matters Scruton disavows modern architecture, and at one point in the film he takes the viewer on a tour through the community near London where he grew up, “a charming Victorian town with terraced streets and Gothic churches, crowned by elegant public buildings and smart hotels.” Scruton’s community was forever altered starting in the 1960s, when homes were demolished to make way for a substantial number of large office buildings and a bus station that brought people to and from London. Scruton claims the brand new modernist style buildings - “all designed without consideration for beauty” - were proof that “if you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless.”

Roger Scruton in his now blighted hometown of Redding, near London. He tells us that: "Beauty is assailed from two directions, by the cult of ugliness in the arts, and by the cult of utility in everyday life. These two cults come together in the world of modern architecture." Screen capture from "Why Beauty Matters."

Today the office buildings and the bus station are boarded up and abandoned; everything has been vandalized and covered with graffiti. The once thriving community is now dilapidated and in a state of neglect, “but we shouldn’t blame the vandals” Scruton insists, “this place was built by vandals, and those that added the graffiti merely finished the job.”

Standing in front of a large deserted office, Scruton says; “This building is boarded up because nobody has a use for it, nobody has a use for it because nobody wants to be in it, nobody wants to be in it because the thing is so damn ugly.” That assertion is pure demagoguery - of course people have a use for the building! There are countless “ugly” buildings currently serving as vital centers of community life, whether in housing, commerce or government. While some may find uninviting architecture to be depressing, that is not what leads to the collapse of urban centers; cities and towns shut down for economic reasons. The property owners that financed and directed the construction of the buildings Scruton deems offensive have now found it more profitable to close and padlock their properties, or have them razed to the ground; such are the workings of capitalism.

In his analysis of architecture and urban decay Scruton makes no mention of government policy or economics, as if towns and cities collapse into ruin simply because people have an aversion to unsightly architecture. He says nothing of the pressures brought about by layoffs and astronomical unemployment, cuts in government services, privatization, inflation, recession, and an increasingly globalized capitalist economy. He does not talk about the role of banks, real estate firms, and other financial interests that fail to invest in communities considered “unprofitable.” Regarding the decades long collapse of his home town near London, Scruton does not bring up Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, whose economic policies resulted in unrelenting assaults upon the British and Irish working class, the destruction of British industry, and crushing unemployment that by 1982 had put well over 3 million people out of work.

In 1961 Piero Manzoni canned his own excrement in 90 small cans and sold the "edition" as art. Cans are in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Screen capture from the opening of "Why Beauty Matters."

In Why Beauty Matters Scruton seems reluctant to say just who is responsible for all of this unappealing architecture, but as I have previously noted, he is more than willing to lay blame in his published articles. In The modern cult of ugliness, a December 2009 article for the Daily Mail, Scruton lets us know who the culprits are; “official uglification of our world is the work of the ivory-towered elites of the liberal classes - people who have little sympathy for how the rest of us live and who, with their mania for modernizing, are happy to rip up beliefs that have stood the test of time for millennia.”

Roger Scruton’s credentials are impeccable; a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University’s Blackfriars Hall, a Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of more than 30 books on cultural and political affairs. As should be apparent from reading this article, this learned man is also an ardent conservative. Scruton is quite well-known in Britain for his outspokenness, but less renowned in the U.S., apart from being appreciated in certain right-wing circles. He is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (home to such U.S. neoconservative luminaries as Michael Novak and Irving Kristol - the now deceased “godfather of neoconservatism”).

Mr. Scruton has been a columnist for a number of conservative publications. In Totalitarian Sentimentality, his Dec. 2009 article for the neoconservative journal The American Spectator, Scruton makes clear his view that conservatism best guards all things noble and just, while liberalism is but a hair’s breadth from tyranny and despotism. Scruton’s fervent political conservatism is inseparable from his views on art and culture.

In June of 2006, Scruton was invited to speak in Antwerp, Belgium before the Vlaams Belang (”Flemish Interest”), an extreme right-wing party of Flemish ultra-nationalists who seek the independence of Flanders. Variously described as xenophobic, racist, and fascist by their numerous opponents, the platform of Vlaams Belang calls for; Deportation of all economic immigrants who fail to assimilate, Repeal of anti-racism and anti-discrimination legislation, and full and unconditional amnesty for people convicted of collaboration with Nazi Germany. By having addressed the Vlaams Belang on the subject of his opposition to multiculturalism, Scruton makes it exceedingly difficult for his views on art and culture to be taken seriously - at least by this artist.

[Roger Scruton’s Why Beauty Matters is available for viewing on YouTube in 6 parts that are each approximately 10 minutes long. I have summarized each part below, simply click the segment's number to watch the video. I encourage everyone to view Mr. Scruton’s film in its totality.]

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 1)
Scruton states in the opening of the film; “In the 20th century, beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb, and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty but ‘originality,’ however achieved, and at whatever moral cost, that won the prizes. Not only has art made a cult of ugliness, architecture to has become soulless and sterile. (…) One word is writ large on all these ugly things, and that word is ‘Me,’ my profits, my desires, my pleasures, and art has nothing to say in response to this except, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I think we are losing beauty, and there is a danger that with it, we are losing the meaning of life.” At the end of this clip, Scruton engages postmodern artist Michael Craig-Martin in a discussion about the nature of modern art.

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 2)
Scruton’s conversation with Michael Craig-Martin continues in this section, with a short but quite remarkable conversation about conceptual artist Piero Manzoni - who canned his own excrement and sold it as art. Scruton continues with a general denunciation of modern art as an auxiliary to advertising and hyper-consumerism, before beginning a critique of modern architecture. He targets the “father” of modernist architecture, Louis Sullivan, for his credo of “form follows function.” Scruton avers that “Sullivan’s doctrine has been used to justify the greatest crime against beauty that the world has yet seen - and that is the crime of modern architecture.”

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 3)
In part 3 Scruton continues to assail modern architecture, which he asserts, is so dreadful that “it is there simply to be demolished.” He extols “traditional architecture, with its decorative details,” and tells us that in architecture “ornaments liberate us from the tyranny of the useful, and satisfy our need for harmony.” In the remainder of this clip, Scruton presents the basic precepts behind his philosophy on art.

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 4)
In this clip Scruton describes how the clash between religion and enlightenment ideas impacted the world of art. He mentions the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), an English philosopher and writer who linked beauty with moral virtue - saying the two are “one and the same.” Shaftesbury’s ideas, Scruton tells us; “encouraged the cult of beauty, which raised the appreciation of art and nature to the place once occupied by the worship of God. Beauty was to fill the God shaped hole made by science. Artists were no longer illustrators of the sacred stories, who worked as servants of the church, they were discovering the stories for themselves by interpreting the secrets of nature.” Scruton also touches upon the aesthetical ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the Classical Greek philosopher, Plato (429-347 BC).

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 5)
In this clip Scruton explores the connection art has had to the West’s Christian religious traditions, and what he calls the defilement of those traditions by modern art. Scruton insists that art can redeem even the most tragic, sordid, and depraved reality. Here he contrasts Eugene Delacroix’s 1827 painting of the artist’s unmade bed (Un Lit défait), to Tracey Emin’s 1998 My Bed (an actual untidy bed with sheets stained by body secretions, the surrounding floor scattered with condoms, cigarette butts, and soiled underwear. Scruton comments on the juxtaposition; “There is all the difference in the world between a real work of art - which makes ugliness beautiful - and a fake work of art, which shares the ugliness that it shows.”

Scruton: Why Beauty Matters (Part 6)
Scruton concludes by saying that art has become “a slave to the consumer culture, feeding our pleasures and addictions and wallowing in self-disgust. That, it seems to me, is the lesson of the ugliest forms of modern art and architecture. They do not show reality, but take revenge on it, spoiling what might have been a home, and leaving us to wander unconsoled and alienated in a spiritual desert. Of course it is true that there is much in the world today that distracts and troubles us. Our lives are full of leftovers, we battle through lies and distraction, and nothing resolves. The right response however, is not to endorse this alienation - it is to look back to the path from the desert; one that will point us to a place where the real and the ideal may still exist in harmony.”

Ah, 2009, when the bold slogans of “Hope” and “Change” morphed into sighs of “Disappointment” and “Business as Usual.” Now is the time to cast away political illusions and resume the work of creating new realities! What better place to start than a “Year in Review” presentation?

On a brief personal note, I have been working on a large body of new paintings and drawings, most of which have not been shown to anyone, and if everything works out a major showing should be in the offing by mid 2010.

This past year two of my oil paintings were featured at the Bakersfield Museum of Art during the museum’s Dia de los Muertos exhibition (September-November). I also had successful showings of my works at the Chicana/Chicano Biennial at the MACLA gallery in San Jose, California (June-August); at the Brand Library Art Gallery & Art Center in Glendale, California, during the gallery’s Man’s Inhumanity to Man exhibit (April-May); and at Avenue 50 Studio’s 365 & Counting exhibit (November-December). Also of note, in June of this year my web log was re-launched in Wordpress, which has proved a boon to creativity.

I’d like to offer readers best wishes for the holiday season. I’ll resume my regular writing schedule come the new year.

(January 3) Waltz with Bashir - This was the very first post of the new year, a review of the brilliant animated film from Israel, Waltz with Bashir. “Based on Israeli director Ari Folman’s real life experiences as a soldier in the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon in June ‘82, Waltz with Bashir is only the second animated feature film to be produced in Israeli cinematic history.” (January 10) A New WPA Arts Program? - During the first month of the Obama administration I contrasted the Depression era arts programs of the WPA to the present, posing the question; “Will the Obama administration offer even a substantially scaled-down WPA-like arts program for today, let alone provide any significant budget increases for already existing arts programs?”

(February 3) Charles White: Let The Light Enter - In praise of the great African American artist, Charles White (1918-1979). “What I always found so impressive about White was that he never abandoned his artistic vision in order to follow the dictates of what was fashionable. Despite the ascendancy and near total dominance of abstract art in the 1950s, followed by the successions of Pop, Minimalism, and all the vacuities of Postmodernism - White remained true to his style of figurative social realism.” (February 11) My Take on Things - My dialog with an art student from Western Kentucky University, and the subject of “Art as Activism.” (February 17) Spencer Jon Helfen: California Modernist Painting - My review of an important exhibition of American Modernist paintings at Spencer Jon Helfen Fine Arts in Beverly Hills, California. The review focuses on two giants of the 1930s California Modernist movement, Victor Arnautoff and Francis De Erdely. (February 23) Edward Biberman Revisited - Now almost forgotten save for aficionados of the California Modernist school, Biberman was the subject of a fascinating retrospective at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Park.

(March 3) Zombie Banks, Art Museums, & War - Wall Street crashes, Obama bails out the banks, museums close while arts organizations layoff 10% of their work force, all the while war funding increases. (March 31) Man’s Inhumanity to Man - I exhibited a suite of four black and white drawings at the Brand Library Art Gallery & Art Center in Glendale, California, part of a group show that examined human rights violations from the 1915 Armenian genocide to the present.

(June 12) The Death of Franklin Rosemont - My eulogy for the American surrealist artist, historian, author, poet, and activist, Franklin Rosemont. (June 22) The Death of Motor City - Reflections on the demise of Detroit and the great tradition of American social realism. (June 25) Artist’s Responses to Homelessness - My review of Hobos To Street People: Artist’s Responses to Homelessness from the New Deal to the Present - a traveling group exhibit on the subject of homelessness.

(July 5) Mexican Prints at University of Notre Dame - My review of the exhibit, Para la Gente: Art, Politics, and Cultural Identity of the Taller de Gráfica, with a special focus on the Mexican artists of the 1930s Popular Graphic Arts Workshop. (July 14) Art Hate Week! - For purposes of giving UK bourgeois art institutions “a necessary kicking.”

(September 2) Guayasamín: Rage & Redemption - My in-depth examination of Latin American master, Oswaldo Guayasamín, and his retrospective at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach, California.

(November 25) The Mona Lisa Curse - My review of The Mona Lisa Curse, a documentary film by art critic Robert Hughes that offers a devastating critique of contemporary art and it’s over commercialization.

(December 1) LBJ, Obama & Afghanistan - In this article I announce the publication of “Hey, Hey, LBJ…“, a web exhibition I curated on the subject of posters from the 1960s that protested the Vietnam war and the policies of President Lyndon Baines Johnson. My article was published the day President Obama announced he was sending an additional 30,000 combat troops to Afghanistan.

"O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time." - John Heartfield. Photomontage. 1935.

Hark the Herald Angels Sing!
Machine Gun Clatter!
Bomb Blast!
Poison Gas!

The anti-militarist Christmas message from John Heartfield shown at left was published on December 26, 1935, in the German magazine, Arbeiter-Illustriete Zeitung (AIZ, or “Worker’s Illustrated Paper”).

The title of the photomontage, O du fröhliche, O du selige, gnadenbringende Zeit (O joyful, o blessed, miracle-bringing time), was taken from one of Germany’s most popular Christmas carols.

Heartfield made a number of photomontage works that touched upon Christmas and how its message of peace was being subverted by the forces of war and fascism.

For instance, in the 1934 Christmas edition of AIZ, the artist published his photomontage, O Tannenbaum im deutschen Raum, wie krumm sind deine Äste! (O Christmas tree in German soil, how bent are thy branches). The artwork depicted a Christmas tree with its branches twisted into the shape of a swastika.

The cover of the 1933 Christmas issue of AIZ featured a photograph of an American battleship with the headline, “And Peace on Earth!” When opening the magazine the reader would see a Heartfield photomontage on the first page - its message read, “Peace on Earth? No peace on earth, as long as the poor become poorer!” Heartfield’s artwork depicted hungry Germans peering into an upscale shop window that was bursting with Christmas merchandise they could not afford.

"The History of the World" - Jeremy Deller. 2004. Pencil and paint on wall. Installation dimensions variable. Turner Prize winner Deller standing in front of his wall chart at the Turner Gallery. Photo by Associated Press.

In 2004 Jeremy Deller won Britain’s most prestigious art award - The Turner Prize - for his short video, Memory Bucket.

Documenting Deller’s travels through the State of Texas, the film impressed the judges at the Tate Modern in London sufficiently enough for them to honor Deller with their highest award, plus a check for $48,000. That Deller admitted he cannot paint, draw, or sculpt to save his life was no impediment to his being proclaimed numero uno in the world of postmodern art; at least for a brief moment in time.

"The History of the World" - Jeremy Deller (Detail).

Deller had actually submitted a number of installations to the Tate’s annual art competition, Memory Bucket being just one of them. In the room at the Tate that displayed all of Deller’s works, one could find his wall chart, The History of the World. Supposedly an exploration of the connections between working class brass bands and the 1980s acid house scene, the chart is a jumble of hand scrawled lines and arrows, along with the names of important bands, events, places, and concepts in music.

Deller’s chart is all but incomprehensible - even to music lovers and historians. But then, striving to create works that are easy to comprehend has never been a strong point for postmodern conceptual artists. Nonetheless, Deller’s The History of the World has been an obvious inspiration to a rather unlikely group of artists, the U.S. military’s Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - who are also reported to possess a total lack of skill when it comes to painting, drawing, or sculpting.

"Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security." Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2009. Unclassified document digitally printed on non-archival paper with foam core backing and laminated surface. Installation dimensions variable.

Trying their hands at conceptual art, the Joint Chiefs have created a wall chart installation titled Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security, a brash reference to the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy, “COIN” for short, which the Obama administration is currently applying in the Afghan war.

While their work has a strong political dimension, the Joint Chiefs have to their credit avoided the tedious moralizing so common with much of today’s political art. By dispensing with outdated notions of craft, skill, and narrative (at least one that makes any sense), the Chiefs have given us a hardheaded no-nonsense look at what really lies behind America’s “necessary war” - confusion, bewilderment, and stupefaction.

The eddy of lines and arrows swirling across the face of Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics – Security, pulls the viewer into the work’s dense subtext having to do with counterinsurgency strategy for Afghanistan, and the impenetrable text that floats on the surface of the piece like an opaque cloud of obscurantist chatter (”Western Affiliation Backlash-Acceptance of Afghan Methods-Overall Government Capacity”) only points to the futility of attempting to make sense of the world. To fully appreciate this ephemeral work, one must put aside logic, as well as any attempt to understand history - just as the Joint Chiefs have clearly done.

"Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security" (Detail). Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 2009.

If Jeremy Deller gave us a fractious view of the world with his unsteady scribbles and nervous squiggles, the Joint Chiefs have delivered order and tranquility with their clean lines and methodically arranged catchphrases. They have created an installation to rival the Turner Prize winning wall chart produced by Mr. Deller; in fact Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security is a postmodern masterwork that will long be remembered after the last body bags are flown out of Kabul.

Every good postmodernist knows that an artwork’s true value is determined solely by its price tag and not some foolishness like “intrinsic spirituality”, or gads - “beauty.” It was wonderful when Jeremy Deller was given $48,000 along with his Tate prize, and it was even more fantastic when Damien Hirst sold his diamond encrusted platinum skull sculpture, For the Love of God, for $100 million. But with the creation of the Joint Chief’s Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security piece, one need ask - what is being born, exactly? It might be the art of the 21st century! Surely by its price tag alone that is so; it took the Joint Chiefs’ $636 billion to produce Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security, making it the most expensive piece of art ever produced. Time will tell whether or not there will be a buyer.

MSNBC wrote an extensive review of the Joint Chief’s Afghanistan Stability/COIN Dynamics - Security installation piece that should be read by all. Click here for a large version of the artwork. Now that the war is finally escalating in Afghanistan and spilling over into Pakistan, one can only imagine what the next conceptual work from the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be like - and what it will cost.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) opened on December 7th, 2009 at the Bella Center located in central Copenhagen. Some 18,000 delegates from nearly 200 nations attended the international summit, which ended in complete failure on December 18th. The summit was ostensibly held to bring about a new international treaty to help reduce global warming, but it quickly broke down into a standoff between wealthy industrialized nations - who wish to preserve their dominance over world economic resources, and the less developed nations on earth - who seek parity and environmental justice.

But this article is not about the political machinations that took place around the COP15 summit, there are plenty of news sources to follow for that side of the story. My intention here is to write about how artists responded to the Copenhagen summit and the growing threat of climate change. Hundreds of artists in and around Copenhagen produced works ranging from posters and sculptures to light shows, street theater, and installations - all designed to draw attention to the climate crisis and ways to end it. People’s Climate Action and Illumenarts are but two of the Danish groups that organized multiple public art interventions and cultural events in Copenhagen – there were many others. The Telegraph has an online slideshow of 28 photographs depicting just some of the many public inventive art interventions that took place during COP15.

"Polar Bear" - Mark Coreth and Duncan Hamilton. Ice and metal sculpture. Height - 5.9 ft. Displayed at the COP15 summit in Copenhagen. Photographs taken on Dec. 7, the first day of the summit. Photo: Reuters

British artists Mark Coreth and Duncan Hamilton positioned their collaborative ice sculpture in Kongens Nytorv Square, close to the Bella Center. To create their sculpture the artists first cast in bronze a polar bear skeleton they sculpted by hand. The metal armature was then submerged in water that was frozen to produce a nine-ton block of ice - from which point the sculptors went to work carving out a realistic life-sized polar bear. Over the course of the COP15 summit the ice slowly melted, exposing the skeletonized bear.

The artists encouraged people to touch their ice bear sculpture since the collective handling contributed to the statue melting away - a simple demonstration of how humans are directly shaping the environment. In the words of sculptor Mark Coreth: “When the skeleton begins to appear, it’s going to become terrifying. When the bronze appears, it is going to take warmth through the skeleton and melt that ice even more. That is akin to a lack of ice in the arctic north… the deep, dark ocean absorbs heat and continues to melt it.” The ice bear project was funded by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a major environmental organization that also displayed photographs of the Arctic at their Arctic Program Tent set up in Copenhagen for COP15. The WWF also maintains a webpage on the ice bear project.

There were more complicated and independently produced projects carried out by the Danish realist sculptor Jens Galschiøt, who placed a number of large cast metal sculptures on the streets of Copenhagen for the COP15 summit. A self-taught sculptor who has been working at his discipline since 1985, Galschiøt’s figurative realist creations are striking, but they are meant to do more than just please viewers with a heightened sensitivity to beauty; here aesthetics are mixed with the compulsion to move people to well considered thought and action. In other words, Galschiøt wants us to change the world. He does not eschew skill, craft, or high art aesthetics - making him an artist after my own heart.

"Survival of the Fattest" - Jens Galschiøt/Lars Calmar. During the COP15 summit the statue was displayed in Copenhagen harbor at Langelinie next to the internationally famous Danish landmark statue, "The Little Mermaid." Photo: AFP/Getty.

In 1992 Galschiøt and fellow sculptor Lars Calmar collaborated on creating a work they titled, Survival Of The Fattest, a nearly life-sized statue cast in copper.

The work depicts a colossally overweight European Justitia (the goddess of justice), holding the scales of justice in her right hand - being carried on the shoulders of a starving African man.

Galschiøt has said that the sculpture represents the “self-righteousness of the rich world,” which sits on the backs of the poor while “pretending to exert justice.” Since its creation the sculpture has been shown at a number of mass public events.

"Survival of the Fattest" - Jens Galschiøt/Lars Calmar. 2002. Statue cast in copper. Height - 6.5 ft. The developed West is represented by Lady Justice, an enormous obese European woman carried on the shoulders of a starving African man. The woman was modeled and crafted by sculptor Lars Calmar. Displayed at the COP15 summit in Copenhagen. Photo courtesy AIDOH (Art In Defense of Humanism). www.aidoh.dk

Survival Of The Fattest was placed in Copenhagen harbor at Langelinie next to the internationally famous landmark statue, The Little Mermaid. Based on a fairy tale by the Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen and created by Danish sculptor Edvard Eriksen in 1913, The Little Mermaid is a national monument seen by an estimated 1 million tourists a year.

In placing his sculpture in the water next to Eriksen’s famous bronze, Galschiøt was assured that his creation - and its explosive message - would receive international attention. The act also brilliantly juxtaposed a fairy tale against the cold and undeniable reality depicted in Galschiøt’s artwork; as if the artist were pronouncing the goals and objectives of the wealthy nations at the Climate Change Conference to be nothing more than fairy tales.

The contradictions Galschiøt alluded to with his Survival Of The Fattest sculpture were made obvious on Dec. 16, when the Obama administration announced at the Copenhagen summit that it would commit $1 billion over the next three years “towards slowing, halting and eventually reversing deforestation in developing countries.” In making the announcement, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack averred; “Protecting the world’s forests is not a luxury - it is a necessity.”

By comparison, Mr. Obama’s other “necessity” - sending an additional 30,000 combat troops to the escalating war in Afghanistan, will cost between $30 and $35 billion per year according to Pentagon estimates; or around $2.5 billion a month. That is no doubt a low estimate.

When President Obama was deliberating on his Afghan war escalation, the Office of Management and Budget sent him a memo estimating that the cost of increased U.S. military presence in Afghanistan over the next 10 years would be $1 trillion - a figure that apparently did not dissuade Mr. Obama from intensifying the war.

Jens Galschiøt’s copper statues of starving African men are displayed wading in the water pond that surrounds the Bella Center, venue for the COP15 summit in Copenhagen. Galschiøt titled his sculpture installation, "The Pulse of the Earth." Photo by Jo@kimlarsen.eu/SevenMeters.Net

One of the other sculptural works by Galschiøt that made an appearance in Copenhagen for the COP15 summit was, The Hunger March. In 2002 the artist sculpted and had cast in copper, a number of life-sized figures of emaciated young African men.

Since their creation the figures - numbering 27 in all - were displayed on the streets during the World Trade Organization summit in Hong Kong (2005), and on the streets of Athens, Greece, during the European Social Forum (2006).

For the Copenhagen summit Galschiøt changed the name of his sculptural group to, The Pulse of the Earth. Gaining permission from the Bella Center in advance, the artist had the 27 copper statues placed in the water pond at the center’s metro station, illuminating the architectural backdrop with a special installation of pulsating red LED lights. According to Galschiøt, the pulse of the light-installations represented the very heartbeat of the planet.

The Pulse of the Earth statues at COP15 represent “Climate Refugees,” those people who are forced to flee their home or country because of drought, desertification, the sea level rising, or other environmental disasters linked to global warming and climate change. When contemplating the desolate tableau Galschiøt setup in the Bella Center water pond, I found it difficult not to think of the tiny Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Hawaii. In 2002 Tuvalu became the first nation to evacuate part of its population because of sea level rising.

This photograph from the artist’s studio shows two of Jens Galschiøt’s copper statues depicting starving African men. Photo courtesy AIDOH (Art In Defense of Humanism). www.aidoh.dk

Ian Fry, the chief delegate for Tuvalu at the COP15 summit, delivered a speech at the conference that was an appeal for a binding international agreement to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Expressing the frustration felt by billions of people around the planet, particularly those who live in undeveloped poor nations, Fry noted that “the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.”

Choking back tears, Mr. Fry concluded his speech by addressing the summit and the people of the world, saying - “The fate of my country rests in your hands.”

On the last day of the summit President Obama addressed the conference. Scientists have been saying that in order to avoid climate disaster, developed nations needed to reduce their green house gas emissions by at least 40 percent by 2020 - in his speech Obama only offered cuts “in the range of 17 percent.”

There were immediate angry responses to Mr. Obama’s speech. The Executive Director of Greenpeace U.S.A., Phil Radford, said Mr. Obama “now risks being branded as the man who killed Copenhagen.” The President of Friends of the Earth said; “President Obama’s rhetoric is empty. The U.S. has failed to significantly improve upon the weak position it brought to these talks.” The Director of the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity, Kassie Siegal, said; “Obama the President is, when it comes to actual actions on climate, far closer to President Bush than Candidate Obama.”

The COP15 summit ended in disaster, scuttled by greed and the narrow self-interests of the world’s biggest polluters. The so-called “Copenhagen Accord” was pieced together by Mr. Obama between the U.S., China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. It was forced through by the summit chair, who according to the Associated Press; “gaveled in a compromise decision to ‘take note’ of the agreement, instead of formally approving it. Experts said that still meant the accord could go into effect.” Mr. Obama effectively kept the majority of dissenting nations out of the negotiations while to all intents and purposes forming the alliance of major polluters who would hammer out the pact.

Demonstrators furious over the sham "Copenhagen Accord" protest outside of the Bella Center as the COP15 summit ends. Photo AFP/Olivier Morin.

Mr. Obama called the final 12-paragraph Copenhagen Accord document an “unprecedented breakthrough” and a “meaningful agreement.” What a laughable statement!

The accord makes no mention of a target date for the creation of a legally binding climate treaty, it provides no target dates for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and it provides no verification or enforcement mechanisms. In short it is a toothless and unenforceable document.

The Executive Director of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, said the accord included so many loopholes that “you could fly an airplane through it - Airforce One, for example.”

Artists and designers played a significant role during the COP15 summit, and they will continue to do so in its aftermath. There is unquestionably much work ahead, and the creative community has an important part to play, not just in keeping the issue of climate change before the public, but in arousing the consciousness of the people and spurring them to constructive action.

"Train" - Jeff Koons. Work in progress. The Director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Michael Govan, has compared the $25 million 70-foot locomotive dangling from a 161-foot crane to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

On November 23, 2009, Bloomberg News filed a report titled “Koon’s $25 Million Dangling Train Derailed by LACMA Shortfall.” The story covers the now delayed collaboration between the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and artist Jeff Koons, whose monumental “sculpture” titled Train, LACMA continues to insist will be erected at the museum’s entrance.

With a projected price tag of $25 million, the work by Koons - if undertaken - will be one of the most expensive public art projects ever to be mounted. However, the collapsing economy continues to incapacitate museums and galleries across the U.S., and LACMA is no exception.

In a Nov. 21, Los Angeles Times article titled “Los Angeles County Museum of Art is hard hit by recession“, writer Mike Boehm reported that the museum’s endowments and donations shrank from a total of $129.7 million in 2007-08, to $29 million in 2008-09, a stunning loss of over $100 million!

As a result LACMA has pushed back plans to build and install Koons’ Train until 2014 at the earliest, as the museum simply does not have the required financial resources to construct the ridiculous thing.

The Bloomberg article quoted LACMA’s associate vice president for communications and marketing, Barbara Pflaumer;

“We wouldn’t do it unless someone funds it; someone has to write us a check. This is a very tough economy. (….) The train is something on our to-do list. There’s no question we’d like it to happen. It’s a question of whether we can make it happen.”

Some things should just not be made to happen. On more than a few occasions I have inveighed against Koons and the Director of LACMA, Michael Govan, so I will not bore you stiff by reiterating critiques already made - though a reading of past fulminations would provide some necessary background to this story. Mr. Govan has persistently worked at making the Koons project a reality, but one really has to ask - why? Is it that Govan, LACMA’s Board of Directors and wealthy contributors, actually believe Koons to be the preeminent artist of our time? I shudder to think that is so, but no other conclusion seems possible.

Considering LACMA’s shaky finances during this exceedingly difficult economic period, not to mention the hard luck millions of Americans have fallen upon - who can sympathize with squandering so much money on something so frightfully banal and stupefyingly crass? That LACMA intends to commission and install Koons’ Train to the tune of $25 million, is analogous to proposing that our great libraries be emptied of the classics and filled up with romance novels, pulp fiction, and comic books.

There is another aspect to this tale. On a surface level the Koons Train sculpture bears a close resemblance to two other train artworks; these were created in Scotland and Brazil respectively, well before Koons drew up his Train proposal for LACMA. The Scottish and Brazilian train projects are little known in the United States, so a close examination is in order. Comparing the three train projects, one is not so much left with the suspicion that Koons simply lifted his idea from others, as one is given insight into just how much Koons’ Train is totally uninspired and lifeless.

"Straw Locomotive" - George Wyllie, 1987. A more evocative and far less expensive faux Choo Choo Train. Photo: Glasgow City Archives.

Scottish artist George Wyllie produced a public art installation and performance piece in 1987 titled, Straw Train. Wyllie paid tribute to the history of the Scottish Railway industry by building a full-sized steam engine locomotive out of straw. The work of building an accurate replica train from straw took place at the abandoned Hyde Park Works in Springburn, Scotland, where the nation’s first private locomotive company built steam engine trains for export and domestic use. At its peak the massive train factory covered 60 acres, employed 8,000 workers, and constructed 600 trains a year.

Upon completion, Wyllie’s Straw Train was paraded through the streets in a public procession that followed the route real engines would have taken as they were transported to the shipping docks at the Finnieston port. Once at the port, Wyllie’s Straw Train was suspended from the famous Finnieston Crane, a prominent landmark in Glasgow, Scotland, celebrating the city’s industrial heritage. The Finnieston Crane once loaded untold numbers of the massive locomotives produced at the Hyde Park Works onto transport ships for export. Wyllie’s whimsical sculpture remained suspended from the massive crane for several months as part of the Glasgow Garden Festival of 1988 – attended by some 3 million people.

Following the Glasgow Garden Festival, Straw Train was transported back to the Hyde Park Works in Springburn, where it was set ablaze in a public performance. As flames consumed the dry straw, the sculpture’s metal armature was exposed. When the straw was reduced to ashes and only the metal framework remained, one could plainly see that the artist had incorporated a giant metal question mark into the structure – the artist’s emblematic signature but also a query as to the fate of Scotland’s industrial past.

Straw Train had great resonance for the people of Scotland, making direct reference to their proud history and accomplishments even as the artist posed relevant questions about capitalist economic restructuring and the resultant deindustrialization of society. Conversely, Koons’ work is altogether bereft of social import. It fails to challenge or advocate and does not lead to any meaningful introspection, it has no connection to history; in fact it makes absolutely no claims about anything whatsoever, it simply exists, like the faux Matterhorn Mountain at the Disneyland theme park in Anaheim, California. Koons said of his project; “It’s very visceral. It gives us a sense of this kind of power and energy and the preciousness of this moment of life.” Just what exactly does that mean? Such a statement could be used to describe a pile of junked automobiles - if one’s intent was obfuscation. And what can be said of those at LACMA who find profundity in Koons’ gobbledygook explication?

The train at the entrance of Mundo A Vapor (Steam World) theme park in Canela, Brazil. Photo by Arqueos Weiss/Wiki Commons.

The popular theme park Mundo A Vapor (Steam World) in Canela, Brazil, incorporates a life-sized steam engine train into its entry way in much the same manner that LACMA looks forward to doing - although only L.A.’s museum has pretensions of presenting “high art.”

Canela is a small picturesque city situated in the mountainous region of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Mundo A Vapor is a charming theme park that presents the history of the steam engine, from toys and crafts to productive technology and train transport – it offers informative displays and fun for the whole family, including a miniature train kiddy ride. The theme park is internationally famous for its unconventional entrance façade which makes use of a full-scale replicated steam engine locomotive; a life-size reconstruction of the 1895 train crash in Montparnasse, Paris. The train’s steam powered whistle actually screams on the hour as the train’s chimney discharges billowing clouds of steam to the great delight of tourists, who crowd around the locomotive to take still photos and shoot videos (one such amateur video can be viewed on YouTube).

Chances are only a handful of people know, or care about, the name of the architectural engineer commissioned to design the entrance façade at Mundo A Vapor, and it is my educated guess that the professional was not awarded $25 million. It never occurs to the jovial tourists flocking around the steam engine behemoth - marooned at the theme park doorway like a beached whale - that the tableau was designed by a specialist; that detail is simply irrelevant. To the cheerful multitudes the train façade offers only a fantastic setting for photographs, nothing more, and that is how it should be seen. If those gathered around the train were told that the locomotive was in fact a majestic sculpture of paramount importance, created by a modern master of unsurpassed vision, and that the objet d’art was worth ten of millions of dollars, they would most likely laugh out loud at the preposterous tall tale.

Photograph of the 1895 train wreck at the Gare Montparnasse train station in Paris. Photo by Studio Lévy & fils.

So then what precisely is the difference between the locomotive at Mundo A Vapor and Koons’ Train? Aside from the fact that the Brazilian train does not spin its mighty iron wheels as the LACMA train is being designed to do, the one and only distinction is that LACMA’s Train is linked to brand Koons; declared by inordinately powerful individuals with exceedingly bad taste to be the finest high-end commodity available on the “art market” today. Museum culture is undergoing a transformation where a sham populism guided by market forces is quickly becoming the norm. Some museums are developing into zones for the appreciation of the kitsch, shallow, and gaudy; there is no better example of this than the relationship LACMA has cultivated with the likes of Koons.

The train at Mundo A Vapor is a real crowd pleaser to be sure, and undoubtedly millions have stood beside it to have their pictures taken, but does anyone think of it as a magnificent artwork? Would anyone in their right mind say of the train; “It gives us a sense of this kind of power and energy and the preciousness of this moment of life”? Well… perhaps some would, just as they might say the same thing about that thrilling roller coaster ride at Disneyland’s Matterhorn Mountain - but that does not add up to momentous art or a thoughtful art experience.

On December 1, 2009, in an address to the nation delivered from the United States Military Academy at West Point, President Obama announced the sending of an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan in order to wage what he calls a “war of necessity.”

"Vietnam: An Eastern Theatre Production" – David Nordahl. 1968. Offset poster. One of fifteen posters included in the "Hey, Hey, LBJ..." essay. Poster supplied by the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG).

To mark the occasion I have written, “Hey, Hey, LBJ…”, an illustrated essay on the subject of U.S. protest posters from the 1960s that lambasted that other liberal Democratic President who supposedly possessed a progressive domestic social agenda - Lyndon Baines Johnson, or L.B.J. (1963-1969).

L.B.J.’s assumed intentions of wanting to implement wide-ranging social reforms in the U.S. were thwarted by his ever increasing military escalation of an unpopular war in Vietnam. President Obama has similarly opened a Pandora’s box with his sharp military escalation in Afghanistan; and while the “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” presentation examines 15 historic posters from our collective past, it also offers the reader glimpses of what the future could possibly hold for us all.

The 15 posters I have written about in my essay disparaged L.B.J.’s foreign and domestic policies with wry humor, sardonic wit, and pointed outrage. What’s more, the prints were exceptional from a design standpoint, and they continue to stand as important political and cultural documents in American history. Despite their historic value and obvious political and aesthetic significance, few of the posters I present in my essay are to be found in online collections, even though they were widely distributed and known in the 1960s. Most of the posters featured in my essay have not been seen since they were first published.

With his December 1 troop deployment announcement, President Obama has fully completed his metamorphosis into L.B.J. Less than one year after his inauguration, Mr. Obama’s promises of delivering “Hope” and “Change” have ended up being battlefield fatalities on the arid plains of Afghanistan. Rather than delivering his diktat of escalating war from the Oval Office of the White House, Mr. Obama revealed his war plans at the same service academy used in 2002 by George W. Bush when the former president explained his Orwellian “Preventative War” doctrine. West Point afforded Mr. Obama the opportunity of presenting his military strategy for Afghanistan against a backdrop of soldiers and Academy cadets – a setting conveying resolute leadership from the nation’s Commander in Chief. How ironic that Obama will next travel to Oslo, Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10.

Obama administration officials have calculated that the Afghan war will cost $1 trillion over the next 10 years – a figure most likely underestimated. The Pentagon says that annually it spends $1 billion for every 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan; and that by the time it delivers a single gallon of fuel to the landlocked country for use by U.S. soldiers, the cost has skyrocketed to $400 per gallon. As the U.S. economy teeters, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the unemployment rate reached 10.2 percent in November ‘09 – that’s 15.7 million Americans without work; the New York Times noted, “If the unemployed lived in one state, it would be the country’s fifth largest.” Just prior to his West Point troop deployment announcement, President Obama boasted that he would “finish the job” in Afghanistan; if the “job” in question is to drive the U.S. further into economic collapse, then Mr. Obama may well achieve his goal.

To help finance the unpopular war in Vietnam, L.B.J. imposed a 10-percent surtax on the American people. Not to be outdone, a number of powerful Congressional Democrats are today hoping to pass the “Share the Sacrifice Act”, a surtax to be forced upon all U.S. citizens in order to help pay for Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The bill would place a 1-percent surtax on all those who earn less than $150,000, with up to 5-percent imposed on those with higher incomes.

The particulars of Obama’s odious decisions should not hinder our optimism and authentic struggle for the democratization and transformation of society. Such a project should never be reliant upon a single politician or individual – the people in motion are the true engine of history.  The publication of “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” is but a small contribution towards wiping away debilitating historical amnesia and political illusions, allowing us to thoughtfully plot a course of action for building a society where words like “Hope” and “Change” are not slogans from some clever marketing and branding campaign – but expressions of a mass democratic impulse fully implemented by a free people.

The complete “Hey, Hey, LBJ…” illustrated essay can be viewed at:
www.art-for-a-change.com/LBJ/LBJ.htm

[ The Docs Populi archive and the Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) were kind enough to give me access to their archives, allowing me to select original posters from their incomparable collections as illustrations for my essay. The opinions expressed in the essay are my own and should not be attributed to either Docs Populi or CSPG. ]

Robert Hughes: "The entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all - in the way that it’s experienced."

In these “postmodern” days it has been said that there is no more passé a vocation than that of the professional art critic. Perceived as the gate keeper for opinions regarding art and culture, the art critic has supposedly been rendered obsolete by an ever expanding pluralism in the art world, where all practices and disciplines are purported to be equal and valid.

Robert Hughes, however, is one art critic who has delivered a message that must not be ignored.

On September 18, 2008, British television’s Channel 4 broadcast The Mona Lisa Curse, a documentary film by Mr. Hughes that offers a devastating critique of contemporary art and its over commercialization.

While a DVD release of The Mona Lisa Curse has not yet been made, a complete version of the film has been published on YouTube, though it is an uncertainty how long the movie will remain posted. The streaming video is presented in twelve parts that are each approximately 6 minutes in duration. In this article I summarize each part and provide a link to it. I encourage one and all to view Hughes’ documentary in its entirety.

In The Mona Lisa Curse, Hughes has described with remarkable clarity the forces seeking to tame art, putting it in the service of plutocrats. The market driven and controlled cultural landscape outlined by Hughes reminds me of what the Italian political theorist and revolutionary Antonio Gramsci once said of society in decline; “The old is dying. The new cannot be born. In the interregnum, a variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The candor and forthrightness of Hughes in identifying the trap art is currently ensnared in should be responded to as a call to arms – especially by artists.

The Curse: Part 1
Hughes opens his film by comparing Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God. Hughes tells us that; “What ties the Mona Lisa to this glittery bobble is their role in a giant shift in the art world, that shift is all about money. It’s a story that I’ve watch unfold during the last 50 years. I’ve seen with growing disgust; the fetishization of art, the vast inflation of prices, and the effect of this on artists and museums. The entanglement of big money with art has become a curse on how art is made, controlled, and above all - in the way that it’s experienced. And this curse has affected the entire art world.”

“Apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world, with contemporary art sales estimated at around $18 billion a year. (….) Boosted by regiments of nouveau riche collectors, and serviced by a growing army of advisors, dealers and auctioneers. As Andy Warhol once observed, ‘Good business is the best art.’”

The Curse: Part 2
In 1962 the Mona Lisa was temporarily loaned to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art by the Louvre in Paris for the painting’s first exhibit in the United States. Over one million Americans filed past Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece – including President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. As Hughes noted about the display of the Mona Lisa; “People came not to look at it, but to say that they’d seen it. (….) The painting made the leap from artwork to icon of mass consumption.” The postmodernist period of art as commodity and mass spectacle had begun.

Screen capture of Andy Warhol from The Mona Lisa Curse. Said Hughes: "He was one of the stupidest people I’ve ever met in my life."

“(….) If anyone had told Leonardo that 500 years after his death, his portrait would be the most famous painting in the word, he’d have thought the notion mad. In 1963 in New York, the Mona Lisa was now treated like it was a photo in a magazine. To be quickly scanned and then discarded.

When Andy Warhol heard the painting was coming to New York, he quipped: ‘Why don’t they have someone copy it and send the copy, no one would know the difference.’”

The Curse: Part 3
Hughes recalls his early days in the vibrant late 1960s art scene of New York, where he met and befriended the likes of Pop artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) and James Rosenquist (1933-).

Rent was cheap, art was affordable, and anyone interested in purchasing original artworks could do so for a song - as art was not yet considered a profit making investment. Hughes adds; “In just a few years this would change, art as commodity would begin to take over from art as art.”

The Curse: Part 4
I found this segment particularly interesting, since I wrote about the history it covered in a 2008 web log post titled, The Unveiling of Robert Scull. In this clip Hughes uses historic footage to tell the tale; “On the 18th of October, 1973, the Sculls auctioned off 50 works from their collection through Sotheby Park-Bernet, Inc. This was the first time a collector from that small contemporary art world treated their collection as an investment.”

The Curse: Part 5
This segment is a continuation of the Scull auction saga from part 4. According to Hughes, “American contemporary art as a serious ‘commodity’ was about to be born.” (….) The Scull auction shifted the art world’s emphasis from aesthetics to money. From now on, not just art lovers, but everyone would want a piece of the action. Contemporary art and big money would be ever more closely entwined.”

The Curse: Part 6
Hughes argues that contemporary art is expensive, not because of any intrinsic spiritual or historic worth, but because it makes for good investments that yield high profits. “The consequences of such prices, was that art became admired, not through any critical perspective, but for its price tag. Auction houses were the new arbiters of taste.” (….) The prices, they have a cultural function - their cultural function is to strike you blind, so that you can’t make your own judgments.”

A particularly funny scene in the documentary is when Hughes visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to view a Damien Hirst ’sculpture’ – a dead shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde titled; The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Barely concealing his amusement Hughes calls the pickled shark; “The world’s most overrated marine organism” - adding that Hirst’s work is “a comedy, but a kind of tacky comedy too, that bears a lot upon the way that we think about art and how it is made.”

The Curse: Part 7
In this segment Hughes tells us that; “At the age of 70, I belong to the last generation that could spend time in a museum without ever once thinking about what the art might cost.” Hughes delves into the changing role and function of art museums, interviewing Philippe de Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 1978 to 2008.

Circa 1960s photo of Robert Hughes and Robert Rauschenberg. Still from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Also interviewed is the affable Thomas Hoving, who served as the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1967 to 1977. Hoving ushered in profound changes in museum culture, using public relations and advertising for the very first time in history to promote museum exhibits. Hoving was the first to allow corporations to underwrite or sponsor museum exhibitions – paving the way to today’s increased corporate control of art institutions.

On the role of museums, Hughes says; “The way that art is experienced in these spaces has changed beyond recognition. The museum has adopted the strategy of mass media; an emphasis on spectacle, the cult of the celebrity masterpiece, art clocked through the blink of an eye or through the lens of a camera. But what it’s gained through an increase in these numbers, it’s lost in terms of freedom of access and availability to the eye and the mind.”

The Curse: Part 8
This portion of the video deals with the recent transformation of art museums into business franchises. The former director of the Guggenheim Museum, Thomas Krens, states in an interview; “The Tate is a brand, the Louvre is a brand - is the Guggenheim a brand, I guess it is.” Hughes comments that “Krens is renowned for putting on shows of Giorgio Armani, in return for massive underwriting from - guess who? - and for franchising the Guggenheim around the world. He pioneered the museum’s global brand, building Guggenheims in Bilbao, Berlin, and Venice, with varying degrees of success and failure.”

In his interview, Krens also said; “If you look at this in global terms, it’s probably in some sense related to the power and importance of brands that represent quality. Quality automobiles, quality wristwatches, or quality cultural objects.” That Mr. Krens can equate the world’s cultural heritage to “quality wristwatches” is telling. Hughes observed that; “Krens’ agenda to popularize the museum is a euphemistic and more palatable way of saying how the art market transforms the museum into a commercial model.”

The Curse: Part 9
Hughes speaks of the commodification of art, saying that in order “To give everyone their Mona Lisa, you must escalate the production process.” The artist’s studio literally becomes an industrial unit churning out “product”, as with Warhol’s “factory.” On the subject of Warhol, Hughes said the following; “I admired some of his work in the 60s and early 70’s, but he turned into a dull celebrity business man branded to the hairline. It was as good as printing dollar bills. The dominance of the art market has produced multiple Andys - global brands like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.”

Hughes examines the role of “art advisors” who peddle misleading information to clueless wealthy clients regarding art as investment; “CEO’s and art speculators have created a feeding frenzy, and they’re serviced by a swarm of art advisors buzzing and crawling around the jam jar.”

The Curse: Part 10
Hughes converses with New York art dealer Richard Feigen, who says; “A menu of certain favored artists has gotten expensive because they have been promoted - this is my opinion - and it has very little to do with how important they are (….) If you have an artist that has a huge supply, it permits promotion of the artist. You can have exhibitions everywhere; it’s worth people’s while to promote it. But some of the stuff that’s consequential doesn’t get shown because it isn’t trendy. Why isn’t it trendy - I’ve just explained, basically it’s not worth anyone’s while to make it trendy.”

A single Warhol print on sale at Sotheby’s for a mere $6 million. Screen capture from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Hughes also focuses on mega-collector and art dealer, Alberto Mugrabi. The men of the Mugrabi family – father Jose and his two sons, Alberto and David, have some 800 works by Warhol in their collection of more than 3,000 works; a private collection thought to be the largest and most expensive in the world.

Mugrabi is shown at Sotheby’s Auction House bidding with his father on a painting by “appropriation” artist Richard Prince – a painting that sold for $7.4 million. Mugrabi professed; “We support these artists by promoting them, by buying them at auction, by buying them privately - you could say it’s a way of controlling it.”

The Curse: Part 11
This is my favorite portion of the documentary. It shows Hughes visiting the Lever House skyscraper in New York City for an interview with collector Alberto Mugrabi. The bottom floor of the building is where the Lever House Art Collection is located; a project conceived by real estate tycoon Aby Rosen and Alberto Mugrabi in 2003 as a way to inject corporate art into the public sphere. At the ground floor courtyard at Lever House, Hughes is confronted by The Virgin Mother, Damien Hirst’s 35ft-tall statue of a young pregnant woman that shows half of the woman’s skin and tissue removed to reveal the fetus.

Damien Hirst’s "The Virgin Mother", a 35ft-tall statue of a young pregnant woman. Screen capture from The Mona Lisa Curse.

Hughes surveys the sculpture and says; “Isn’t it a miracle what so much money and so little ability can produce? Just extraordinary. You know, when I look at a thing like this I realize that, so much of art - not all of it thank god, but a lot of it - has just become a kind of cruddy game for the self-aggrandizement of the rich and the ignorant, it is a kind of bad but useful business.”

The Hughes interview with Alberto Mugrabi is priceless; a confrontation between two philosophies, one that extols art as spiritual and necessary to the human heart, the other that sees art strictly in business terms. Hughes is sagacious, looking all the world like some great wise owl as he controls the discussion from his perch. Mugrabi attempts to hold his own but he is clearly outgunned. It is remarkable to see Mugrabi, a man who shapes, manipulates, and controls a fair share of the elite art world, reduced to babbling in the presence of an opinionated art critic who speaks his mind. A typical exchange in the conversation follows:

Hughes: “You take Richard Prince to be an artist of significance, do you?”
Mugrabi: “Absolutely”
Hughes: “What is significant about his work?”
Mugrabi: “He’s a guy that has his own ideas… he’s a person that has done a lot of different types of work…”
Hughes (interrupting): “But Richard Prince’s works seems to consist of basically two types. One is those rather weak jokes, and the other one is the transcription of photographs in paint.”
Mugrabi: “He’s such a deep person that maybe you don’t see it in his paintings – but he definitely is.”
Hughes: “If he is why does one not see it in his paintings?”
Mugrabi: (momentarily struck silent) “Cuz… I, I see it… I think, I think…”

The Curse: Part 12
Hughes wraps up his documentary with some final words;

“Some think that so much of today’s art mirrors and thus criticizes decadence, not so – it’s just decadent, full stop. It has no critical function, it is part of the problem. The art world beautifully copies our money driven, celebrity obsessed, entertainment culture; same fixation on fame, same obedience to mass media that jostles for our attention with its noise and wow and flutter.”

“For me, the cultural artifact of the last 50 years has been the domination of the art market. Far more striking than any individual painting or sculpture. It has changed art’s relationship to the world and is drowning its sense of purpose.”

“If art can’t tell us about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it. And that is something we are going to have to face more and more as the years go on; that nasty question which never used to be asked because the assumption was always that it was answered long ago - ‘What good is art?, What use is art, what does it do? Is what it does actually worth doing? - and an art which is completely monetized in the way that it’s getting these days, is going to have to answer these questions or it is going to die.”

"200 One Dollar Bills" - Andy Warhol (Detail) Silkscreen ink on canvas. 1962. 80¼ x 92¼ inches. Sold at Sotheby’s auction for over $43 million.

On November 11, 2009, Sotheby’s in New York held an auction of Post-War and Contemporary art, attracting a crowd of deep-pocketed collectors who ended up spending over $134 million in acquiring 52 artworks by an assortment of celebrity artists – mostly from the Pop Art school of the 1960s. The biggest seller of the evening was Andy Warhol, whose 200 One Dollar Bills - the earliest silkscreen print made by the artist – was sold to an unidentified bidder for the ridiculous sum of $43,762,500.

The celebratory headlines regarding Sotheby’s auction bordered on the giddy in the mainstream press, “The Art Market Shows Signs of Life” (Wall Street Journal), and “Warhol painting gives brush-off to art downturn” (Financial Times), are but two examples. Reading these accounts one is left with the impression that the great economic crash of 2008 never occurred. During the same week as the Sotheby’s auction, the U.S. Labor Department reported that the actual unemployment rate in the U.S. soared to 17.1 percent. But you would not have known this from the frenzied bidding at Sotheby’s or from the laudatory accounts of the auction in the media.

Press accounts have not offered any in depth analysis of the meaning or repercussions of Sotheby’s astonishing sale. For instance, with museums across the U.S. slashing budgets, firing staff, freezing hiring and wages, canceling exhibits, reeling from plunging endowments, and in some cases permanently closing their doors to the public – all because of the economic downturn; how is the making of $134 million by Sotheby’s auction house and a handful of commercial agents any indication of a healthy arts scene? Moreover, with more and more artworks being purchased by private parties at astronomical prices, artworks to be sequestered away in private collections – how will under funded museums be able to acquire important works? What will happen to the public’s access to historic works of art if they are all held in private collections?

"Roll of Bills" - Andy Warhol. Pencil, crayon, and felt-tip pen on paper. 1962. 40 x 30" inches. Purchased at Sotheby’s auction for $4,226,500 by Manhattan art dealer, Larry Gagosian.

One should recall that in February of 2009, President Obama signed into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, his so-called stimulus package. That plan allotted $50 million to the National Endowment for the Arts, monies that were distributed in July of 2009 to 631 arts organizations across the U.S. It was a woefully inadequate sum, as over 2,400 art institutions in dire straights had applied for financial assistance. To put all of this in perspective; one unidentified individual purchased a single print by Andy Warhol for over $43 million. Again, how does such an acquisition contribute to the health and stability of the art world? It is simply an exchange of trophies between oligarchs.

Writing for the New York Times, art critic Holland Cotter seemingly joined the crowd enthralled by all that is golden, informing us that Warhol was “one of the first modern artists to realize, or rather to say out loud, that money itself is beautiful, is art, which has helped create the reality that, aesthetically speaking, it is as often as not, the price tag, not what it’s attached to, that generates value.”

I could give Cotter the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is opposed to art being monetized to the extremes we are presently witnessing; but if that were the case then he would have said so – however feebly. Instead, Cotter’s observations are equivocating and fuddled. He seems to be in agreement with the widely held supposition in elite art circles that the essence of art is not humanist concern, historic import, or spiritual core; let alone technical skill and artistic vision - but simply exceptional marketing skills and sky-scraping prices. The avariciousness exemplified by Warhol’s early 60s quip; “Good business is the best art” – has become one of the prevailing tendencies now poisoning the art world. It is indeed a shame that Cotter, and other art critics as well, are unable to proffer anything approaching a well thought out critique regarding the dominant role of money in today’s art world.

"Violins Violence Silence" – Bruce Nauman. Neon tubing with suspension frame. 1981-82. 62 x 65" inches. Purchased at Sotheby’s auction for $4 million.

At least one commentator mustered a somewhat critical assessment of the proceedings at Sotheby’s. In his article for the New York Times, arts writer Souren Melikian made a few withering comments about the auction, first laying into Warhol by writing; “The price paid this week for the Warhol signals the triumph of what some might call commercial propaganda. The essence of propaganda is relentless repetition, and few names have been tossed about with as much insistence as Warhol’s.” Melikian closed his article with a wry jab at Bruce Nauman, whose “(….) neon light tubes attached to a suspension frame, executed in 1981 or 1982, realized $4 million. The letters they form read ‘Violins Violence Silence,’ hence the title of the work. The alliteration aside, the contradictory evocations of the title do not mean a great deal. But then, meaning did not seem to be a primary concern on a day when the mechanical reproduction of 200 bank notes cost more than $43 million.”

In the early 1950s Nelson Rockefeller, whose family ran the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), referred to abstract art as “free enterprise painting”; but what would Mr. Rockefeller have said about the art sold at Sotheby’s? Certainly the works avoid serious examination of the world and our place in it, not even in a cynical or banal way. In some cases the works, like Warhol’s, are nothing more than brazen celebrations of money; empty, meaningless, and without the slightest interest in the human condition. But then, Warhol once said; “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

In the early 1960s Robert Scull, the taxi cab company tycoon and art collector, purchased 200 One Dollar Bills directly from Warhol. I have no idea what Scull paid for the print, but seeing as how he had purchased an original painting of flowers by Warhol at around the same time for $2,500, it is hard to imagine the purchase price of 200 One Dollar Bills being any higher. In 1973 Scull sold off a portion of his Pop Art collection at a controversial auction that made over $2 million – which at the time was an extraordinary amount of money. It was the event that ushered in the overriding role of big money in art. Scull’s auction was considered so offensive and exploitative by artists that dozens of them set up a picket line outside of the auction house in protest. Warhol’s painting of flowers sold for $135,000.

In 1986 Scull sold Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills for $385,000. At the 2009 Sotheby’s action it sold for $43,762,500 - perhaps ten years from now it will sell for $1 billion. Whatever its inflated “market value” turns out to be – it will merely be a reflection of the gross narcissism of those rich enough to own it.

The forces involved in the Sotheby’s auction represent an extremely influential layer in the elite art world, people who must surely believe they are shaping and controlling the future of art; but as any student of history will tell you, the most grandiose plans of the powerful are often times thwarted by material conditions, social pressures, and the acts of the independently minded. I count myself amongst the latter category. I obviously do not believe that “Good business is the best art” or that it is “the price tag, not what it’s attached to, that generates value.” In fact, I do not believe business has anything whatsoever to do with creating art, just as it has nothing to do with one’s prayers or one’s heart when it is bursting with love. Call me a fool, but I have always believed that art serves a very noble purpose in our collective experience. It is one of the highest expressions of human achievement, so great in fact that scholars throughout the centuries have always pointed to the arts and sciences as the truest measure of civilization. If in lieu of art, all we pass on to the future is a superlative business acumen – then we shall be appropriately judged.

Here I am reminded of the words of Joseph Incandela, a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Incandela is a physicist working on producing the so-called “Higgs boson,” a particle that so far has remained unobserved, but could someday help answer a number of elemental questions pertaining to matter in the universe. Needless to say Incandela is a man of lofty thoughts, and unsurprisingly he made an interesting comment about art in a recent CNN interview concerning his research. Believing that art and science are linked by shared goals, Incandela remarked; “Both of them enrich the human existence beyond just the maintaining of health, wealth and welfare. They both have an idealism also associated with them, a timelessness.”