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.

Enthusiasts of American social realism are generally familiar with the outstanding murals that were painted in 1934 on the interior walls of San Francisco’s Coit Tower. Few however, can name a single artist out of the twenty-six that worked on the murals inside the splendid Art Deco tower. One of those artists was Bernard Baruch Zakheim (1896-1985), a Jewish immigrant from Poland who would make San Francisco, California his home in 1920, becoming active in the Jewish community and the city’s bohemian circles of artists and left-wing activists. A number of Zakheim’s works are now on exhibit at the A Shenere Velt Gallery on the Westside of Los Angeles until October 23, 2009.

A Shadkhn - Bernard Zakheim. Costume design sketch for L.A. production of Sholem Aleichem’s, The Doctor, circa late 1920s. Shadkhn is Yiddish for “Matchmaker”, and in Yiddish Theater the matchmaker was portrayed carrying an umbrella. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo by Kirsten Cowan.

Titled Bernard Baruch Zakheim: Paris, San Francisco and Beyond, the exhibition is made up of 24 paintings and drawings created by the artist from the early 30s to the late 50s. I attended the opening of the exhibit and was pleased to meet the artist’s son, Nathan Zakheim, who regaled me with tales of his father’s life and work. It was a fortuitous encounter that gave me further insight into the creative output of Bernard Zakheim. Consisting mostly of sketches, watercolors, and studies for murals never created, the exhibition presents works that have rarely, if ever, been shown in public.

Nathan Zakheim told me that his father lived in Los Angeles for a short time in the late 1920s, and at some point produced costume and set design sketches for the Yiddish theater. A number of sketches created for a production of The Doctor by the famous Yiddish playwright Sholem Aleichem, are included in the exhibit. The gestural and humorous nature of these drawings makes them a sheer delight, but they are also important in that they are documents of the vibrant Yiddish theater scene that once existed in L.A. The adaptation of The Doctor that Zakheim worked on took place at the Wilshire Ebell Theater – then a major venue of literary Yiddish plays in L.A. along with the Assistance League Playhouse in Hollywood and The Globe Theater (now the New Beverly Cinema).

Study for WPA mural - Bernard Zakheim. Tempera on paper. Circa 1935. This full color sketch was submitted to the Works Progress Administration for a mural on the subject of immunology research. Regrettably the WPA did not commission the work. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo by Kirsten Cowan.

Two works on display in the exhibit, a finished sketch for a mural on medicine and immunology and a preliminary painting titled, The Donner Party, were submitted as mural proposals to the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the mid-1930s, but unfortunately were never commissioned. Zakheim’s sketch for the immunology mural is related to the well-known 1935 mural he created on the history of California medicine for the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco. Notwithstanding being a classic example of art from the 1930s, the mural sketch on display at the A Shenere Velt Gallery is a lost treasure of sorts. I can only speculate as to why the WPA did not approve Zakheim’s immunology mural, but the drawing certainly belongs in a museum collection.

The Donner Party is an especially moving painting based upon the doomed party of some 80 American settlers who attempted to reach California by covered wagon in 1846, but instead became snowbound in the Sierra Nevada – where they resorted to cannibalism in order to survive. Painted with tempera on paper, the study has the look and brush strokes of a fresco mural, and no doubt Zakheim intended it to be a mural for a post office or school. The painting depicts two figures, a seated man in a state of torment, and the woman who comforts him with her merciful touch. The man’s left hand is clenched into a fist of anguish and he wears a look of dismay upon his face, having just realized what he must do in order to stay alive. The woman has placed her hand upon his in a gesture that conveys acceptance of the unavoidable. The profundity of Zakheim’s painting goes well beyond the depiction of a tragic event in American history, instead it speaks of the “human condition”; the needless suffering people everywhere must endure in life. The work was also prescient, as the couple Zakheim painted could have been – just a few years later – European Jews contemplating annihilation under fascism.

Student Scholar - Bernard Zakheim. Tempera on paper. 1931. Image courtesy of Nathan Zakheim and A Shenere Velt Gallery. Photo - Kirsten Cowan.

Bernard Baruch Zakheim’s life as an artist was set in motion when he was a young man in Poland, but one could say that his professional career actually began once he settled in San Francisco. In June of 1930 he organized the city’s First Yiddish Art Exhibition, a showing of Jewish painters, sculptors, poets, and composers from San Francisco. He had developed a fascination with the socially engaged artists of the Mexican Muralist Movement, and was particularly interested in Diego Rivera, and so he sent the Mexican muralist a portfolio of drawings for comradely appraisal – a deed that would end up transforming Zakheim forever. Rivera would invite Zakheim to his studio in Mexico City, and when the two met in 1930 Rivera praised Zakheim’s drawings of Jewish life, commenting that “every artist puts into his work something of his own soil, of his own people.” Zakheim worked with Rivera long enough to know that his future lay in creating public works of art that were challenging in nature.

After his encounter with Rivera, Zakheim would make a sojourn to Paris, France in 1931, where he created a number of sketches and watercolors. A few of these are included in the exhibit, like the spontaneously painted watercolor portrait, American Girl in Paris, and Student Scholar, which provides a depiction of Orthodox Jewry in Paris just prior to the Nazi occupation of 1940. Zakheim returned to San Francisco in ‘32, receiving his first mural commission a year later from the newly-built Jewish Community Center at the intersection of California Street and Presidio Avenue. While Zakheim was a secular Jew absorbed in socialist politics, he always thought it important to highlight Jewish culture and heritage in his art, and so his mural for the center was a celebration of Jewish life. The mural depicted a festive Jewish wedding celebration, with rabbis, wedding couple, musicians, dancers, and athletes. The press wrote good reviews about the mural, no doubt pleased that the bohemian left-winger had avoided doing something controversial - but that would soon change.

The Library - Bernard Zakheim. Coit Tower fresco mural. 1934.

In 1933 Zakheim and fellow artist Ralph Stackpole lobbied the government for a commission that would allow artists to paint murals on the interior walls of San Francisco’s newly constructed Coit Tower. Their efforts paid off when in 1934 the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) gave twenty-six artists – Zakheim and Stackpole included – the task of creating the Coit murals under the direction of Victor Arnautoff.

Zakheim chose to depict a U.S. public library in his mural - it would become his most well-known and contentious work. He painted a number of his friends into the mural, like the anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth, depicted on a ladder reaching for a book on a top shelf. In the upper-right corner of the mural Zakheim painted the modernist sculptor Beniamino Bufano reading a paper with the headline, B. Bufano’s St. Francis Just Around The Corner. It was a reference to Bufano’s 18-foot granite statue of St. Francis of Assissi; a sculpture finally set in place in front of the Church of St. Francis in San Francisco on August 27, 1955. Bufano was certainly a colorful character; thoroughly bohemian, but a devout Roman Catholic in addition to being an anarcho-pacifist. When President Woodrow Wilson declared war on Germany in 1917, Bufano chopped off the trigger finger of his right hand and mailed it to the president as a protest against America’s entry into the war.

The Library - Bernard Zakheim. Detail of Coit Tower fresco mural. 1934. Zakheim included a portrait of fellow artist John Langley Howard reaching for a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Zakheim also worked fellow Coit Tower muralist and friend John Langley Howard into The Library – reaching for a copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Zakheim was twice asked by officials to obliterate the reference to Marx from his mural, and his refusal to do so almost scuttled the entire project. Ultimately Zakheim’s stubbornness prevailed and Das Kapital remained.

Starting in 1940 Zakheim began a series of remarkable easel paintings titled Jewish Patriots of the American Revolution. The works revealed and commemorated the historic role of Jews in the anti-colonial American Revolution waged against the British Empire. When American patriots began the Revolutionary War of Independence against Great Britain, there were fewer than 2,000 Jews living in the 13 colonies, and the majority of them championed and fought for the anti-colonial cause. Zakheim wanted people to remember that history, and so began his group of paintings. One of the canvases was titled, Revolutionary Patriot Chaim Soloman revealing secrets of Red Coat military activities to an American Officer.

Revolutionary Patriot Chaim Soloman revealing secrets of Red Coat military activities to American Officer - Bernard Baruch Zakheim. Oil on canvas. 1940. A wealthy broker, Soloman became a leading financial backer of the Revolutionary War against Great Britain.

Chaim Soloman was an early member of the Sons of Liberty, a secret mass organization of anti-colonial rebels in the Thirteen Colonies whose slogan was “no taxation without representation.” The Sons of Liberty attacked the property and symbols of British power, with the group’s most famous propaganda of the deed being the 1773 Boston Tea Party. More importantly, as a wealthy broker Soloman became a primary financial backer of the American Revolution. Zakheim painted a tableau in which Soloman appears as a revolutionary spy, passing on intelligence information about the Red Coats to an unidentified commander of the American Continental Army. In actuality the British arrested Soloman for spying in 1776. Though pardoned, he was arrested again in 1778 and sentenced to death. He escaped to the rebel capital of Philadelphia were he resumed his duel role as financial broker and pro-Independence revolutionary.

Mass Executions in the Stadium - Bernard Baruch Zakheim. Watercolor. 1939. Zakheim, an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republic, depicted the fascist troops of dictator Ferdinand Franco butchering workers in an amphitheater, the scene illuminated by an army searchlight.

Unfortunately the Zakheim exhibition at the A Shenere Velt Gallery is rather limited in scope, presenting only a small number of sketches and paintings from the artist’s enormous body of work. Perhaps a comprehensive retrospective of his art will someday be mounted by a museum; such a showing is certainly long overdue. In the meantime I have attempted to pique the interest of those unfamiliar with Zakheim by mentioning some of his paintings not included in the exhibit just reviewed. I also suggest visiting www.bernardzakheim.com, which handles the artist’s estate.

The Bernard Baruch Zakheim: Paris, San Francisco and Beyond exhibit runs until  October 23, 2009. A Shenere Velt Gallery is located on the Westside of Los Angeles at the Workmen’s Circle building: 1525 S. Robertson Blvd. LA CA 90035. Phone: 310-552-2007.

On May 22, 2008, a monumental bronze bust of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician to be elected to public office anywhere in the world and a martyred hero of the gay rights movement, was unveiled and officially dedicated in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall. Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, but was shot to death by an assassin a year later at S.F. City Hall along with the Mayor of the city, George Moscone. The unveiling of the commemorative statue, officiated over by San Francisco’s current Mayor, Gavin Newsom, occurred on what would have been Milk’s 78th birthday.

The realistic bronze bust of Milk stands atop a solid granite base, situated upon a pedestal faced with a bas-relief bronze plaque, and taken as a whole the monument is 75 inches high and weighs over 200 pounds. The slain gay rights activist is portrayed flashing his famous winning smile, his tie fluttering in a gentle wind. The relief plaque portrays three scenes from Milk’s life and times, his service in the U.S. Navy, riding in a Gay Pride Parade, and a depiction of the massive spontaneous candlelight march held by thousands in San Francisco the night of the assassinations. A quote by Milk appears on the pedestal as an inscription - “I ask the movement to continue because my election gave young people out there hope. You gotta give ‘em hope.”

Some years ago the S.F. Board of Supervisors passed a resolution authorizing the statue, and a private committee raised the funds to secure and build the memorial. The San Francisco Arts Commission held a design competition, and selected a panel of jurors to judge the submissions. Out of three finalists, the commission was awarded to the Daub Firmin Hendrickson (DFH) sculpture group, a Berkeley, California based team that excels at creating figurative realist sculptures and bas-relief plaques cast in bronze.

DFH is a partnership between sculptors Eugene Daub, Rob Firmin, and Jonah Hendrickson, and their collaborative, traditional style bronze statues have appeared as public art works across the nation. In their own words, the trio specializes in “sculptures devoted to the aesthetic illumination of important histories and uplifting allegories, created in monumental scale cast in bronze.” I commend the Daub Firmin Hendrickson sculpture group, not just for continuing the tradition of realistic monumental public sculpture, but also for seeking and accepting such an important commission as the Harvey Milk memorial. DFH should also be applauded for avoiding the “great man” theory of history that so often explains momentous events being the work of solitary individuals. By including panels on their memorial sculpture showing a mass movement of people, DFH gives us the view that history is made when enough people move together towards a common goal.

The assassin of Milk and Moscone was Dan White, a former police officer and a disgruntled law maker who had just resigned from the S.F. Board of Supervisors. Armed with his police revolver and extra ammunition, White secretly entered City Hall through a window in order to avoid detection and shot the two politicians at close range. The gunman surrendered himself to the police and his trial would be closely watched by the nation - it ended up being important for several reasons.

White denied the shooting was premeditated, and his legal team successfully argued that he suffered from “diminished capacity” due in part from eating too many Twinkies - the media came to call this the “Twinkie Defense”. Rather than receiving a murder conviction, White was instead found guilty of voluntary manslaughter and given a seven year prison sentence. San Francisco’s gay community and its allies immediately reacted to the verdict by filling the streets with angry protest, and thousands turned violent. On the evening of the “White Night Riots”, twelve S.F. police cars were set ablaze by furious rioters. White would serve slightly more than three years of his prison sentence before committing suicide, and in 1982 the California legislature would do away with “diminished capacity” as a legal defense. These events and more are covered in the Oscar-winning 1984 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk suspected that someone would eventually try to assassinate him, so he recorded a statement to be played in case of that eventuality. In that public statement Milk said; “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” While some obstacles barring gays from enjoying full democratic rights have been done away with - others still remain. The memorial bronze of Harvey Milk placed in San Francisco’s City Hall should be a constant reminder of what has yet to be achieved.

On May 1st, 2008, the Los Angeles Times reported that famed L.A. muralist Kent Twitchell settled his lawsuit against the U.S. government for obliterating his six-story mural depiction of artist Ed Ruscha. Starting in 1978, it took Twitchell nine years to complete his mural on an outside wall of the L.A. headquarters of the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2006 the mural was deliberately painted over by a maintenance crew working for the government.

Federal and state laws protect commissioned murals in the City of Los Angeles from desecration or destruction; specifically, the federal Visual Artists Rights Act states that an artist must be given a ninety day notice before a building owner can paint over a mural. Twitchell received no such notice before his mural was arbitrarily destroyed, so he’s been awarded a $1.1 million settlement. To date it is the largest settlement to have been paid out to an artist under state or federal laws meant to protect artist’s rights - and I won’t hesitate to say that Twitchell fully deserves the money. I first heard of his mural being destroyed the day it happened, and without delay I called the L.A. arts community to his defense, so it’s gratifying to learn of Twitchell’s court victory - which also bodes well for all other muralists and artists creating public art across the country.

I met Twitchell a short while after the destruction of his mural, when photographer Gil Ortiz and I visited his Playa Vista, California studio in August of 2006 - hence much of what follows is based upon the chat I had with Twitchell during that visit. He was affable and friendly, revealing his feelings concerning the destruction of his Ed Ruscha mural, his life as an artist, and his views regarding the state of art in America today. No doubt Twitchell was irate over the destruction of his mural, but he possessed a clear-headed understanding of the social implications of his next move - a lawsuit against the U.S. government. At the time Twitchell told me; “I don’t want to blow this thing, I could hurt other artists if I blow this thing. I’ve got to make them know that they can’t just paint out a work of art just because they feel like it - there’s a law that they have to follow… they can paint it out, they can do whatever they want to it, they just have to be polite about it, but they were not.”

Known for his monumental works, I asked Twitchell if he ever created small scale artworks. “It’s a lot easier for me to work at least life-size. A lot of times when I work small I don’t pull it off, maybe two out of three times it’s ok. If I work life-size or bigger then almost everything I do I like.” Then he went bounding off to the second story of his studio to rustle through his archives. He returned with a portfolio of original sketches and lithographs that were delicately wrapped in acid free paper for purposes of preservation. Some of the drawings were of individuals that appear in his massive 405 Freeway mural, L.A. Marathon, a work that celebrates the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics but is unfortunately now damaged by graffiti. The drawings were composed of tightly woven crosshatched lines, the work of a highly skilled and disciplined draftsman. Twitchell chuckled and said “Sometimes I draw this way, not because it’s better, but because I’m obsessive compulsive - that’s who I am.”

Amongst the portfolio’s drawings and prints there was an amazing portrait of artist Lita Albuquerque. The lithograph was immediately recognizable as a print version of the huge Lita Albuquerque mural Twitchell painted alongside L.A.’s Harbor Freeway in 1983. I mentioned to him that I had just recently driven past the mural, and that it was almost completely destroyed by graffiti, to which Twitchell replied “I won’t have to repaint it because she’s so protected, all of that graffiti will come right off without damaging the original painting.” He then began explaining the process used to protect his street murals; “First there’s a type of wax that’s applied to the surface, followed by a coating of anti-graffiti material”, but Twitchell is well aware that restoration of a damaged mural is a relatively simple matter - and that a far bigger problem lies ahead for L.A. murals. Once restored to pristine condition they will immediately be defaced by graffiti taggers who respect nothing but their own trivial notoriety. Twitchell’s Albuquerque mural is still in situ, but as of this writing it’s completely buried under layers of graffiti - only Albuquerque’s eyes peer out from behind the shroud of spray paint vandalism.

Looking at Twitchell’s vast body of work, it’s easy to see that he has a passion for realism in painting, yet I wouldn’t call him a photo-realist. In spite of the fact that he uses modern techniques and equipment in his mural making, Twitchell is very much a traditionalist whose influences range from the Old Masters to Salvador Dali - he confided in me; “I want to paint one of my heroes, Grant Wood, the great American regionalist painter, who just tweaked the New York art establishment. He used to wear bib overalls - a brilliant man, went to Paris, learned about Modernism - he could do it as well as anybody, but he went back to Iowa and continued as a regionalist painter with Hicks, Benton, and the others - and he did it on purpose. So unpretentious, and that’s what art needs - unpretentiousness.”

A close up examination of Twitchell’s paintings reveals, not brush strokes, but tiny fields of pure color. He equates this to the Pointillism of French artist George Seurat, but notes that Seurat accomplished his paintings by using “pure colors, while I use values.” For all intents and purposes the outlines of Twitchell’s murals look like an extremely complicated paint by numbers drawing, but by stepping back just a few feet, the crazy quilt patchwork of values becomes a sharp focused realistic portrait.

Los Angeles has a deeply rooted tradition of public murals, from 1930s works by the likes of David Alfaro Siqueiros, Hugo Ballin, Dean Cornwell, and those artists working for the Works Progress Administration - to the late 1960s mural renaissance that sprang from the Chicano and African American social movements. However, the forward thinking community based activism that served as a catalyst for the city’s mural movement utterly collapsed decades ago - only to be replaced by a nihilistic apolitical narcissism that is daily expressed in graffiti vandalism.

At present some of L.A.’s murals have been destroyed outright, most others have fallen into a state of disrepair, and all are threatened by graffiti, especially outdoor murals located at street level. Scores of graffiti scarred murals are now simply beyond restoration. The L.A. Daily News addressed the issue in a 2007 article titled L.A.’s street murals disappearing, framing the problem in the following manner; “Once the mural capital of the world, Los Angeles has quietly surrendered that distinction to Philadelphia over the past five years. While the City of Brotherly Love spends $4.5 million to paint, restore and maintain its 2,700 murals, the City of Angels has just $20,000 to look after its documented murals, which once numbered 3,000. Artists say 60 percent of them - about 1,800 - now are either gone for good or have been nearly obliterated by tagging and vandalism.”

In 2006 I asked Twitchell what he thought about the state of the L.A. muralist movement and his answer was blunt, “The muralist movement is dead.” That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but any impartial observer would have to agree. The L.A. Times article that reported on Twitchell’s mural settlement quoted him as saying; “What’s really discouraging about most public art is the way that, in this city of ours, spray paint vandalism has kind of taken over the streets. What was once the mural capital is now the graffiti capital - although I don’t call it graffiti, I call it spray paint vandalism. We cannot coexist.”

I’m sure there are those who assume Twitchell is now “set for life” because of his settlement with the government, and that he can now retire to the lap of luxury. He is under no obligation to continue being a productive artist, and with his murals coming under attack from every direction, some would ask why doesn’t he just give up. That would be a complete misreading of the artistic spirit. Twitchell has devoted his life’s work to muralism, and knowing his devotion to the art, it’s a certainty he’d much rather have his mural of Ed Ruscha standing in pristine condition than to be awarded a cash settlement - no matter how large. Twitchell’s admonition that muralists “cannot coexist” with graffiti vandals is more an avowal to stand firm than it is a statement of surrender, and in the effort to re-establish the tradition of community based murals - I’ll stand shoulder to shoulder with the muralists.

I spotted this anonymous street art poster of Republican presidential candidate John McCain in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles. The title of the poster, Police and Thieves, comes from a Jamaican reggae hit written by Junior Murvin in 1976 and popularized further in a 1977 punk version by The Clash. Rebuking gang violence and police brutality, the lyrics chide: “Police and thieves in the street, Oh yeah!, Fighting the nation with their guns and ammunition. (….) No one stop it in anyway, And all the peacemaker turn war officer, Hear what I say - Police, police, police and thieves oh yeah!”

For the last month or so, posters that look as if they were made from stencils have been appearing on city streets from Los Angeles to New York City. Giving the impression of having been created with black spray-paint and a cut-out template, the grim face on the poster is imperfect with its fuzzy edges and runny paint drips. The image looks like a thousand other stencil visual renderings you’ve seen on urban walls and sidewalks. However, the red stenciled letters make it clear this is not social commentary from an underground artist. The street poster’s minimalist message reads: “Stallone. Rambo. In Theaters January 25.”

While the promotional drive for Rambo IV began with faux stencil posters placed directly on city streets, it quickly escalated into a flood of posters used on the sides of buses and on illuminated bus benches as the release date of the film drew closer. That bilge like Rambo IV can be publicized through “guerilla marketing” does not bode well for the future of street art. This is certainly not the first instance of street art aesthetics being used for commercial purposes, but the campaign for Stallone’s film unquestionably represents a sophisticated and well co-coordinated expansion of the trend.

The motivations of those who use the street for art and the promulgation of ideas is very different from those who want to capture every available public space as a platform for marketing products. While some artists have been handsomely rewarded for selling their supposed “street cred” to corporate advertisers, others resist turning over the methods and influence of street art to commercial branding and big business. It is my fervent hope that the implacable anticommercial forces will win this, and every other battle, in the new year.

Washington D.C. has a new public monument, the Victims of Communism Memorial. The 10-foot high bronze is a replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue carried by heroic Chinese dissidents in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square just prior to their being shot by Chinese soldiers in June, 1989. Designed by American sculptor Thomas Marsh, the diminutive carbon copy statue sits in a small park within view of the nation’s capital, and on June 12th, 2007, President Bush dedicated the memorial before a crowd of 1,000 people. When I first saw photos of the dedication event I thought it was an Onion magazine parody.

In an interview conducted by the conservative National Review magazine, Thomas Marsh revealed that he took no fee for the creation of the bronze, stating that “(….) when I witnessed the brutalities (via television and print news) of the Tiananmen massacre, I vowed to rebuild the statue, and to never profit from that act. I feel it is wrong to make money from human suffering.” The artist went on to say that, “I feel the emerging primary role of art in human life will be personal and social transformation. I view the Democracy statue as a moving example of this kind of art. It certainly was not an act of self-expression.”

I could almost have said those very words myself, save for the fact that Marsh’s statements masquerade as artistic objectivity and disguise a rightist agenda. And herein lay the conundrum, can one easily distinguish between a genuine work of art utilized as an honest, solemn memorial, and an artwork that functions purely as political propaganda? Let’s take Maya Lin’s breathtaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial as an example of the former. It simply does not allow a single political viewpoint to lay claim to it - Lin’s granite wall serves as a poignant memorial for all who gaze upon it - opponents and supporters of the Vietnam war alike. Conversely, Marsh’s reworked “Goddess of Democracy” sculpture is the closed fist to Maya Lin’s open hand. Marsh’s bronze draws a line in the sand and dares you to cross it. There is no self-reflection in the sculpture, just a demand that the viewer adhere to its “correct” ideological reading of history. Like all works of propaganda it is triumphalist - especially so when considering who commissioned it.

Marsh’s statue was commissioned by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOCMF), and it should come as no surprise that George W. Bush is the Honorary Chairman of that foundation. Lee Edwards, Distinguished Fellow at the ultra-right wing Heritage Foundation, is the VOCMF’s Chairman. Edwards hypothesizes that 100 million people died in “the communist holocaust.” Has anyone bothered to ask Edwards how he arrived at this number? The influential militant conservative Grover Glenn Norquist serves as the VOCMF’s Director. Norquist is the fellow responsible for infamously saying that he wants to shrink government “down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub” (excluding of course any program to do with the military or the national security state.)

And then of course there’s Paul M. Weyrich, Chairman and CEO of the right-wing Free Congress Foundation. A backer of the VOCMF, he explained in a 2003 press statement in support of the anti-communist memorial about our needing “to hear the stories of the millions of victims who suffered and were put to death by a truly Godless regime” - as if that story hadn’t already been drummed into our heads for decades. Weyrich is also the gentleman who notoriously stated that “We are different from previous generations of conservatives…We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of this country.”

In his interview with the National Review, Marsh said of his sculpture, “The Democracy statue is unambiguous in its meaning: It stands for man against the State. Specifically, it stood and stands for man against the most brutal tyranny ever devised, communism.” Hmmm… “man against the State.” But the VOCMF was established by a 1993 Act of the United States Congress, the same congress that now trips all over itself to help establish and expand American corporate investment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC.) It all rings rather hollow when you stop to think that Wal-Mart, KFC, Coca-Cola, General Motors and hundreds of other U.S. corporations are presently doing business in the PRC.

The following words come from the transcript of President Bush’s speech at the dedication ceremonies: “The sheer numbers of those killed in Communism’s name are staggering, so large that a precise count is impossible. According to the best scholarly estimate, Communism took the lives of tens of millions of people in China and the Soviet Union, and millions more in North Korea, Cambodia, Africa, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and other parts of the globe.” Of course, the bureaucrats in Beijing heard about the memorial and Bush’s brash words, and they issued a strongly worded statement that in part read: “Some US political forces still cling to their ‘Cold War’ mentality and out of political necessity seek to provoke conflicts between different ideologies and social systems. This runs counter to the trend of the times and is unpopular.”

But the dedication of the latest memorial in the U.S. capital seemed less about the “victims of communism” and more an opportunity to push Washington’s newest crusade - “the war against terror.” At the dedication, the president said, “Like the communists, the followers of violent Islamic radicalism are doomed to fail. By remaining steadfast in freedom’s cause, we will ensure that a future American president does not have to stand in a place like this and dedicate a memorial to the millions killed by the radicals and extremists of the 21st century.” And as you might expect, no American will be counted amongst the extremists of the 21st century, but sadly there will be a memorial dedicated to the thousands of American soldiers who died because of a politician’s lie.

Excuse me for being contrarian and bringing up embarrassing facts, but for those who’ll cringe over what I’m about to say, you can always dismiss my quarrelsome nature by quoting the illustrious wisdom of Ronald Reagan - “Facts are stupid things.” And the fact of the matter is, the reds were not the only ones doing the killing. The good folks at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation have compiled quite a record that chronicles “communism’s crimes against humanity” - they just forgot to include what the other side did.

I can’t offer a full accounting of what evils the good guys committed in order to stop the advance of communism, that is after all, not the purpose of this web log. But some distressing episodes do come to mind, like the 1965 U.S. backed coup d’état against President Sukarno of Indonesia. The U.S. cold war establishment viewed Sukarno as a threat that had to be eliminated, and so unleashed the anti-communist generals of the Indonesian army - who began a bloodbath that resulted in some half a million Indonesians being put to death for purely political reasons. A 1968 report by the CIA referred to the butchery as, “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.” But there’s no real need to be troubled by those mass executions, every last man, woman and child were dirty reds - or so we’ve been told. And in any case, we did it because we love liberty, so the victims will not receive a memorial statue.

As an example of communist barbarity, President Bush mentioned in his speech the heartbreaking tale of the unfortunate “Polish priest named Father Popieluszko, who made his Warsaw church a sanctuary for the Solidarity underground, and was kidnapped, and beaten, and drowned in the Vitsula by the secret police.” But Bush made no mention of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 by U.S. funded right-wing death squads as he gave a homily in Church. Because of his concern for the poor, Monseñor Romero was called a communist by El Salvador’s right-wing elites, who marked him for death. Even the murdered Archbishop’s funeral was attacked by U.S. trained Salvadoran army sharpshooters, who succeeded in killing dozens of unarmed mourners.

There is another fine chapter in our brave fight against the reds that begs for the raising of a large memorial in the U.S. capital - and that has to do with the U.S. engineered coup against the government of Chile. On September 11th, 1973, U.S. backed generals lead by Augusto Pinochet launched a bloody coup against the first democratically elected Marxist head of state, Salvador Allende. President Allende died in the fighting when the putschists bombed the presidential palace. Subsequently, General Pinochet proclaimed himself the leader of the country and imprisoned and tortured his opponents. Over 3,000 innocent Chileans are known to have been murdered by Pinochet’s terror squads, and thousands of others were simply “disappeared” and remain unaccounted for. But of course, this was all done in the name of fighting communism - so it was a good thing.

On September 21, 1976, a terrorist car bomb on the streets of Washington D.C., took the lives of Orlando Letelier (an ex-diplomat from Allende’s socialist government) and American journalist, Ronnie Moffet (Moffet’s husband Michael was seriously injured but survived.) As it turned out, the assassination was pulled off by agents of the Chilean government, the very regime hoisted upon the Chilean people by Washington. Pinochet’s terror squads had murdered their opponents in the land of the free. A small plaque now marks the spot on Sheridan Circle in Washington D.C., where the killing took place, but it is woefully inadequate as a suitable memorial. I propose that a life-sized model of the bomb blasted car Letelier and Moffet were killed in be cast in bronze and mounted on a pedestal along Sheridan Circle. The inscription can be the same one found on the base of Thomas Marsh’s statue - For Those Who Love Liberty.

When General Pinochet died on December 10th, 2006, Paul M. Weyrich wrote a eulogy for the fascist dictator, titled, The Pinochet legacy: a free, non-Communist Chile. In that tribute, Weyrich proclaimed that the tyrant “should go down in history as a liberator.” Weyrich went on to say, “I know it is heresy to say this but the people of Chile should thank Pinochet. He saved their nation from a brutal Communist ‘experiment.’” People everywhere who believe in democracy and human rights have denounced and scorned General Pinochet. That the VOCMF courts and embraces the likes of Weyrich, reveals not a passion for freedom, but an extremist right-wing agenda.

At the Victims of Communism Memorial dedication ceremony, President Bush said, “Communist regimes did more than take their victims’ lives; they sought to steal their humanity and erase their memory. With this memorial, we restore their humanity and we reclaim their memory.” Mr. Bush, we are still awaiting the Washington D.C. monuments commemorating the genocide of the Native Americans and the horrendous days of slavery suffered by African-Americans.

In July of 2005, I wrote about Myth of Tomorrow, a long lost but rediscovered mural by famed Japanese artist, Taro Okamoto. Painted in Mexico between 1968 and 1969, Okamoto’s mural depicting the horrors of nuclear war was located in the lobby of what was to be a luxury hotel, but the building was never completed and the mural - painted on large panels - was put into storage and subsequently lost. In 2003 the panels were found abandoned in a warehouse, and arrangements were made to ship them to Japan for restoration and eventual display - that day has arrived, but the great masterwork has yet to find a permanent home.

Mounted on the street in a special protective housing, the mural has been on free public display in Tokyo’s Shiodome district since July 10th where it has so far been viewed by tens of thousands of people. The director of the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, Akiomi Hirano, has offered the gigantic mural to any public institution willing to put it on permanent display, but because of its massive size (18 feet by 98 feet) there have been few takers. The municipal governments of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki have turned down the opportunity to display the mural, siting lack of funds to build an appropriate site for the work as well as space limitations. Still, Hirano is hopeful the mural will find a permanent home by 2011, the 100th anniversary of Taro Okamoto’s birth.

The following Japanese language websites offer more information about Okamoto’s mural. The Hobo Nikkan Itoi Shinbun Partnership website is displaying an animated gif that shows the artist creating his mural in 68 - as well as a collection of still pictures. The Nippon Television Network Corporation also presents a series of still photos. The Chugoku Shimbun reports that a full scale image of Okamoto’s mural was projected on the wall in front of the A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima during the memorial for the 61st anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan.

A crime against art has been committed in the city of Los Angeles. The famous outdoor mural, Ed Ruscha Monument, by Kent Twitchell has been destroyed by mindless bureaucrats, who had it painted over for some inexplicable reason. The 6 stories tall mural painted in acrylic, was created between the years 1978-1987, and was located on a building that presently houses the U.S. Department of Labor. At the moment it’s unclear who ordered the mural destroyed - a harebrained civil servant connected to the Labor Department or a local imbecilic contractor responsible for the building’s upkeep. Either way, someone must pay dearly for the deliberate obliteration of one of L.A.’s most famous murals, and Twitchell has announced plans to file a lawsuit, an action every artist should support.

Quoting the informative Los Angeles Times article on the willful destruction, “Works of public art are protected by law, including the federal Visual Artists Rights Act.” The conservationist who had been working on the mural prior to its pointless trashing, Nathan Zakheim, said “creators of murals typically must be given 90 days to respond before a work can be destroyed.” Twitchell was given no such warning, and there’s no doubt federal law was broken when the famous mural was painted over. But who will be held accountable for this crime? L.A.’s artists must hold the city liable for this assault against art and demand full funding for the re-painting and restoration of Twitchell’s mural. If the guilty party is allowed to escape justice, then every single mural in the city of Los Angeles is in peril.

Otis College of Art and Design refers to Otis Alumni, Kent Twitchell, as “one of the most respected and recognized outdoor urban muralists in the world.” That is unquestionably true, but the nitwit pen pusher responsible for ordering the mural destroyed apparently suffers from a lack of understanding and respect for art - a mindset common to barbarians everywhere. I’m calling for a vigorous defense of Kent Twitchell, and by extension every muralist across the United States.

[ UPDATE: On July 10th, 2006, The Los Angeles Downtown News reported that, "Attorneys representing muralist Kent Twitchell are planning to file suit this week against a 'nongovernmental entity' and a claim with a governmental department involved in the destruction of the 'Ed Ruscha Monument' in Downtown, said Les Weinstein, an attorney with Pasadena-based firm Sheldon & Mak.'" ]

[ Sculptor and curator of public art, Thomas Powell, wrote the following essay titled, Why Public Art Sucks - And How It Can Be Improved. In his critique he discusses the failings of modern American public art, and enumerates the reasons for its collapse. Powell asserts that a major cause of the breakdown in public art is that it must compete with the overwhelming and ubiquitous presence of commercial advertising, but he also examines the bureaucratic control mechanisms that are a part of public art funding, and the absence of a larger social vision on the part of artists. Powell’s essay came to me by way of Mat Callahan's quarterly newsletter of music, art, and philosophy, available at: www.matcallahan.com ]

“Across America for the past quarter century or more, municipalities, counties, states, public institutions and universities have taken it upon themselves in the spirit of humanism and civic responsibility to become the sponsors of publicly funded visual art. On campuses, street corners, and barrio walls, on billboards, bus stops, and freeway abutments, in derelict downtowns in desperate need of revitalization, public artworks have sprung up like cultural mildew. Large freestanding metal behemoths, colorfully painted wall murals, ceramic mosaics, foam and fiberglass installations, neon bolted to architectural concrete, lithographs lining the hallways of county courthouses, glass baubles casting rainbows about the sunlit atriums of mental health wards: what hasn’t been commissioned? What medium and what style of our pluralistic post-modern art smorgasbord has not been purchased for public display with public moneys?

A handful of these public artworks are great, no doubt about it. A larger handful are unbelievably atrocious. But the vast bulk of this public adornment is merely mediocre. As the dust of each new commission settles, as the patina of newness dims, the fate of public artwork in America is to relentlessly fade into the background grime of the surrounding urban wallpaper. Can this truly be the case? I invite you to do your own mental inventory of the public artworks in your town.

The One Percent for Art funding mechanism attached to public capital improvement projects at the local and state level was hailed as a brilliant strategy to capture some public funding for art when it was first conceived and implemented in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In the several decades prior to that, funding for public art in the United States had completely dried up. The federal government buttoned its purse to everything except cemeteries and war monuments when it got out of the W.P.A. funding business at the onset of WW II. State and local governments had no previous experience in art patronage. Religious sources were non-existent as Catholics were not erecting cathedrals while Protestant have little use for art. But by the mid-1970¹s, the most critical cause for the poverty of public art in the preceding half century was the popularity of architectural modernism which eschewed the adornment of buildings. Thus, the one percent for art funding strategy for artists and for the visual art world was indeed a step in the right direction.

The idea steadily gained momentum, and by the 1990’s one percent (even 2%) for art mechanisms had become institutionalized across the land. A decade further, artistic careers have been financed, thousands of public artworks have been commissioned, millions of dollars in public investment have been spent. This sounds remarkably like a success story, not a suction, but the truth is that after three decades, this well-intentioned vision has plateaued into more of the same mediocrity. Public art is in desperate need of a new vision, and new blood at the helm. While complaints from artists, administrators, and the public rebound all over the map, the shortcomings of the entire enterprise actually fall into four main groups.

The first failure of public art in America has been its inability to understand that there are in fact two parallel patronage systems that bring visual art into public awareness. The dominant mode in terms of budget and sheer quantity is advertising. Advertising is a public art. It is the “popular” public art in contrast to “elitist” or “formal” public art. Advertising is free and ubiquitous. In corporate, consumer driven, capitalist America, advertising is a necessary condition. But, in order to be effective, advertising must change, update, and seem forever novel. The attention span of American consumers has been conditioned to be brief. The result on formal public art is that murals and sculptures on street corners look staid; they become dated as soon as the paint dries.

The paradox of this situation is that advertising, “the applied arts,” as a sub-category of art, can be brilliant occasionally, but taken as a whole, it can never be as creative or imaginative a venture as fine arts. Advertising and propaganda follow the visual arts, not the other way around. The pace of production, the unrelenting sales pitch, and the compromises inherent in that form of patronage encourage artist in the advertising profession to steal imagery and concepts from fine artists all the time. Applied arts routinely milks the fine arts without credit or remuneration. A royalty tax on advertising would go a long way to help fund formal public art.

This brings us to the real crux of the matter, the difference in budgets. For every one dollar spent on public art, and this would include all the local, state, and federal subsidies for public art programs, institutions, museums, and opera houses, etc., thousands and thousands of dollars are spent on advertising. The advertising budget for a big box retailer runs ten to twenty-five percent of their annual operating costs or higher. By contrast, public visual art is generally funded by one percent of project cost for capital improvements like new firehouses, parks and roadways. The true lopsidedness of this funding situation is obscene. Public art sucks in many cases because there just isn’t enough of it to form a critical mass. Adding another decimal place, ten percent for art, to its funding source would begin to rectify that. Formal public art is drastically under funded in America.

The second reason public art sucks is because the entire process is controlled by bureaucrats and political appointees, many of whom are complete ignoramuses when it comes to art. Public art programs in most communities are subordinated hierarchically within the Planning Department or within Cultural Affairs. The director of the public art program may hold an art degree, but he answers to the department head above him who is subject to political pressures from above. To keep his ass out of the fire, the director of the PAP does his best to avoid controversy, and so censorship is built into the commissioning process. This is reflected in the call for entries, and the guidelines for submissions. The themes that are chosen for commissions are generally pallid and intended to be non-offensive, politically correct, and please Lord, not controversial.

The selection of the winning entry is done by committee. Rarely is there any critical criteria on who can serve on a selection jury for such juries are assemble under the misguided political expediency of “inclusiveness.” Juries are assortments of well-intentioned members of neighborhood associations, site architects, a representative of the municipal department from which the moneys are attached, artists, tenured art faculty, political appointees, and perennial dilettantes. Few of these souls have ever taken an art appreciation class, have any vision for public art beyond “I know what I like,” or have agreed to make any long-term commitment to serve on consecutive selection juries for five to ten years, or to generally educate themselves about appropriate sites, materials, methods, or public art in any historical or philosophical context.

The selection process is the biggest failure of all public art programs. Decision-making by ignorant, inclusive committees and good public art are mutually exclusive principals which come together only by rare statistical coincidence. The unfortunate general mediocrity of the national collection of public art which has been acquired by cities and hamlets across the nation through this funding mechanism can be attributed first and foremost to the fiasco of entrusting the administration of the program funds to mid-level bureaucrats with no degree or background in art, no concept of collection, no long term vision or goal, and no commitment to maintain or conserve the art which now represents millions of dollars in public investment.

The third problem with public art in America is the general antagonism towards it from architects. The source of the antagonism is that architecture is still wallowing in the fiscal aesthetics of modernism. To the general dismay of its founders, the clients of big architecture embraced the glass and steel ugliness of modernism for the beauty of its bottom line. Post-modern architecture has yet to attract clients in numbers to return to the opulent budgets of yesteryear. While individual architects may like public art, and may collaborate effectively with commissioned artists, as a rule, architects are taught to believe that architecture is the highest art form, which of course it is, when its done their way. Historically, architects have chosen the artists to adorn their buildings. In this manner, the architect controlled the entire project budget, created the interior and exterior spaces for art to hang, dictated the form and style of accompanying artwork, and thus reduced the role of artist to artisan. By contrast, one percent public art moneys are withheld from project budgets to be administered by art bureaucrats. What self-respecting architect would want some schlock public artwork appended upon his opus? Therefore, architects always get themselves appointed to the art selection jury, and they try to nix any art proposals they consider aggressive or challenging. Often, architects figure out how to rip off the public art money to divert into their own budget for landscaping or fancy railings. A fair warning to any artist after a public art commission: do not automatically trust the architect. A fair warning to architects: create architectural spaces for artists.

The final reason why public art sucks today has to reside with the artists, themselves. Artists in the United States are educated in art schools, the “best” ones are generally affiliated with universities and private colleges. The education offered by university art schools across America is sorely deficient in two fundamental categories. Art schools do not teach student artists how to make a living as artists simply because art professors do not make a living as artists, they don’t have a clue how to do it, they never have done it, so therefore they don’t instruct it, even offer it, or consider it relevant. While this situation is not without its pathos, it does clear the field of art students of mild persuasion who are not willing to starve after graduation to pursue the vocation. Students wishing to make a living as artists generally must attend design colleges of applied arts.

What is by far a more flagrant dereliction of instruction is that art schools do not teach the philosophy of art. Instead, art schools teach art theory which throughout much of the 20th Century has consisted largely of hyperbole and good psychedelics. All of us have little bits and pieces of philosophy inherited from our grandmother, personal prejudices, and lessons picked up along the way from the school of hard knocks, but this hardly represents a cohesive, rigorous philosophy. To do philosophy, to organize the observable world into a rational epistemology requires a particular quality of mind that is rare in the human species. Fortunately for artists, there have been a significant number of these thinkers who have devoted their faculties towards art. So where are the art professors who have made any effort to collect these wisdoms? Where is the course curriculum for a philosophy of art? The relevant question here is, how can any civilization hold any grand vision for a public art that defines it as a civilization (as all previous civilizations have been defined by their art) if it possesses no guiding philosophy of art? Public art in America sucks because we the artists are philosophical cripples, full of agendas, full of theories, but with no larger vision.

If you are an artist reading this, especially one who has attempted or participated in public art, I know you will recognize your own experience as I’ve described it. Do you care? If so, what can be done to significantly alter the situation to favorably benefit artists, and to create a meaningful and visionary public art? Strategies and methodologies for success can be invented or borrowed. The important thing is to create vision. The first part of that vision must be to raise the funding of public art by a hundredfold and more. Nothing under the regime of capitalism has stature if it is not expensive. For public art to be validated, it must consume more of the public purse. Therefore, art must figure out how to tax the big ticket items of advertising, religion, architecture, government, education, health care, science, sports, and especially militarism. Art projects must siphon off significant portions of these budgets. That would dramatically change the world!

The economics of vision will require the activism and dedication of artists and their supporters. Nobody will hand this over to us. We must each develop our own positive vision of the future, a vision both personal and collective. This allows us as artist to operate out of familiar self interest towards societal goals. Collectively as artists, we possess both the moral credentials as educated culture workers, and the necessary skills as technicians to project into the public domain the future we envision for our families, our species, and our mother earth. We can be critics, visionaries, and educators just as readily as we can be shills for the agenda of a patron. Vision requires philosophy. One cannot be an effective visionary without knowing the thoughts on the subject of those who preceded us. This does not mean mere opinion - though that is useful - but a deeper understanding of how visual art stimulates the individual psyche or how it can define the cultural identity of a society.

Why has every human population as far back as we can excavate found it necessary to produce some form of visual art expression? Why is art so central to the human identity? These are the macro questions that beg investigation in the education of young artists. A profound and courageous philosophy of art is the road to the empowerment of artists as a profession and as a class. It represents one energetic path along which to steer global civilization towards a saner course. Public art has long been the propaganda arm of those who have ruled, sometimes benignly, sometimes through terror. It does not have to be that way.”