The other day I met up with an old friend in downtown LA and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The exhibition was called “Monuments” and featured a dozen or so statues that had once memorialized the Confederacy. Some had been toppled and defaced during the George Floyd protests. Others had been rearranged. One or two had been carefully removed and reinstalled fully intact. On entering, my friend looked around and muttered, “Looks like it’s the white guilt exhibit.” Indeed, as I milled among the mostly white patrons and black guards, I got the feeling that there was something I had to atone for, a message I had to get, or else.
The exhibition was originally intended to coincide with the civil rights debate that embroiled the country after George Floyd’s murder. During its delay, times had changed. American politics had shifted away from the truism that brutalizing black people is wrong and toward the fallacy that woke is wrong. Conservative politicians had put the outrages of the late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties behind them and gone on the attack. They branded liberals and liberal institutions as unjust. They denounced these repurposed memorials as the legacy of a woke scourge foisted on the country by the radical left.
These same anti-elitist, anti-liberal, so-called “populists” elected a president who promised to kill the civil rights debate, bury the legacy of slavery and reinstitute white as the national color, straight as the national sex and Christianity as the national religion. His political and cultural purges took attention away from political art. Now, these pieces had a problem common to all political art: their effect had diminished in proportion to the outrage that inspired them.
Changes in American politics are driven by public outrage. And the atrocities that give rise to outrage—sorry, Gil Scott-Heron—are televised. Only after the public has been whipped into a frenzy over what it sees on a screen does it connect with political art. And after the outrage subsides—it usually takes a couple of years—the art viewer, art critic, art historian and art patron forget the art itself.
The outrage over George Floyd subsided before the twelve sculptures were put on display. People still went to see them, of course, but the message of the works wasn’t timely enough to affect them as passionately as it would have several years ago. Instead of confirming their present abhorrence, it justified their memory of it. For me, the message was redundant. I felt like I was hearing it twelve more times than the hundreds of times I had already heard it. It was a message that I’d heard since the Rodney King riots of 1992, or—if you count being aware of something—the race riots of 1968.
I’ve always interacted with people as individuals, regardless of my general thoughts about them. I consider the “great replacement theory” to be an absurdity with no perpetrator or end game. I don’t fear replacement. I’ve befriended people of various races, ethnicities and nationalities since childhood and none of them were alike. So when a work of art exists to send a political message that I’m already familiar with, I stop at the message and stop considering the art.
This is not to say that art shouldn’t generate political ideas. It’s to say that, to be interesting, it should invite an esthetic experience. By that I mean an invitation to experience the world in an esthetic way. Art asks me to consider how and why it appears as it does. For instance, this postcard with a print of Cézanne’s “Pommes et oranges,” which I keep on my desk, invites me to see an apple not as a food item but as a thing of unique beauty. Cézanne makes the apple palpable by sharply defining its shape, mass and texture. He uses rich, rustic yellows, oranges and reds to represent the apple as an entity of both mass and light. His humble apple becomes both a substantial and energetic presence. All of the fruit on the table, though individually distinct, are presented in the same light and thrown on the waves of the same white tablecloth.
Political art is less an invitation to behold the world in uniquely esthetic terms than an invitation to see it in general political terms. Because art is the bailiwick of the political left, those terms will usually adhere to the party line and invariably feed into the ameliorative sentiment we call progressivism. But this should not come as a surprise, as progressivism has always been allied to art. It has always been kin to the novelty that drives art movements and the civilizing intention of art institutions. As allies, progressivism and art struggle against a common enemy: philistinism. It so happens that philistinism predominates on the political right and conservatives tend to ignore art or denounce it as elitist, immoral and worthless.
Last week a Gustav Klimt painting, Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer, sold at auction for $236 million. Fox19 could not help but juxtapose it to a solid-gold toilet that sold at the same auction for $12 million. The Klimt painting, though it served to protect Elisabeth Lederer from the Nazis, was not in itself political. But the golden toilet was. The artist Maurizio Cattelan explained the message of his work, America, this way: “Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise.” The golden toilet was a joke about class and wealth disparity in America. And whoever paid the $12 million for it (Ripley’s Believe It or Not!) was the butt of it.