So once again, a museum invites an artist to do a piece and then is shocked! SHOCKED! to find that the artist wants to do his art, not the museum's art. This time it's MOCA in LA and the piece, now literally whitewashed, was a not-very-subtle antiwar mural -- coffins draped with dollar bills -- painted on an outside wall of the museum by a street artist named Blu.
The explanation given for removing it from the outside of the building is the usual -- fear of giving offense -- though curators usually let others make that complaint before they cave in. And apparently, the response was also typical, if dispiriting since it doesn't sound like there was much solidarity among grafittists. Shepard Fairley told the LA Times, "I’m not a fan of censorship but that is why I, and many of the other artists of the show, chose to engage in street art for its democracy and lack of bureaucracy..." (Last time Fairley showed up on my radar was when he had a much ballyhooed show at Boston's ICA; i.e. a museum, not a street.) And an art critic argued in HuffPo that it wasn't censorship because curators get to decide what's in their shows. (Which is true, but not exactly the point.)
What's interesting is the presumed offended population: veterans and Japanese-Americans. It seems MOCA is right near a VA hospital and a monument to Japanese-American soldiers. It's the context, not the content, said the curator. Well, it's always the context. Context matters. But what are the assumptions about that context? That all veterans of all ethnicities support all wars whole-heartedly? That they don't know shit about art or metaphor? That showing anything less than reverence to veterans is, what? UnAmerican? A spitting image? More impolite than the wars they fought?
Monday, January 17, 2011
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Sunday, January 2, 2011
According to a synopsis of a behavioral study in the Boston Globe (1/2/11), researchers found that private punishment for selfishness in a game bred more selfishness among other players than publicly announced punishment. (Xiao, E. & House, D., “Punish in Public,” Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming) In other words, shaming works. Of course, lots of cultures know and practice this, while others rely more on internalized guilt, but it's relevant to our culture's response to speech we don't like. Instead of trying to censor or criminalize bad speech, why not publicly shame people who speak shamefully? I mean, if we believe that words are powerful enough to hurt us, aren't they powerful enough to hurt a malign speaker back? And little speech is more effective than smart, perfectly pointed mockery that exposes jerks.
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