Back in December, I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (“LACMA”) to see an exhibit entitled “Fashioning Fashion: European Dress in Detail, 1700-1915.”  Historic European and American fashion has always been something of a hobby of mine, so I was excited when I first heard about the exhibit.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The exhibit contained a very large, beautifully displayed, well-explained collection of European fashions from 1700-1915.  It was a lovely reminder of a time when clothes, at least clothes for the middle classes and wealthy, were hand-made, with exquisite attention to detail and decoration.  In other words, the clothes were a perfect example of the decorative arts.

Since we were at LACMA, after admiring the clothes, we wandered about a bit, and found ourselves in vast space housing a collection funded by Eli and Edythe Broad.  It was very modern.  There was a giant fish tank, filled with clear acrylic, in which there appeared to be floating three half submerged basketballs.  Next to it was a glass display case with three shelves, each containing several electric floor polishers, all resting horizontally.  There was a giant, maroon, shiny egg, broken in two pieces, as if a metallic lizard had recently hatched.  There were several pieces of wood, not quite as big as 2 x 4s, nailed together in a seemingly random pattern.  There was a chain link fence with metal sculptures mounted upon it, each of which was skillfully crafted to look like a child’s plastic pool toy.

There was also a very lovely young woman there, a museum employee (or, perhaps, a volunteer) who was happy to explain what all this stuff meant.  She told us that it illustrated “social mobilism.”  That was a conversation stopper.  By the time we’d processed this bit of linguistic nonsense, she was speaking to other people, and it would have been rude to interrupt to seek further enlightenment.

The more I thought about it, though, the more intrigued I became by that silly phrase.  In the past, art served three purposes:  it glorified the rich and powerful; it glorified God, and, in a pre-photographic era, it recorded the world around us.  To be worthy of artistic respect, all three of those goals required skill and elegance.  Nowadays, though, art is the equivalent of a lost soul.  God is dead (at least in the art world); the rich and power live on television and in glossy magazines; and every cell phone enables us to record our world with almost nauseating frequency.

For those who have graphic skills, money resides, not in cozying up to power brokers (as did the artists who served the Medicis, the Popes, or the various European monarchs), but in providing commercial images, whether for movies, magazines, posters, or anything else.  We may admire the craftperson’s skill, but we don’t call it “art.”

Because the modern world imposes severe limitations on what was once the artist’s purview, the only thing left for the person with genuine artistic talent — or mere artistic pretension — is to produce things that make the critics happy.  If you can’t have wealth, at least you can have praise from a rarefied class of academics and “art” magazine journalists.  It won’t pay the rent, but it will make you feel good about yourself.

These critics, living in or coming from academia, all hew Left.  To them, it’s only art if it challenges what they perceive as America’s failings:  her religiosity; her crass commercialism; her grim, depressing people; and her sexual perversions.  Art, in other words, is anti-American.

Of course, one can’t say that out loud, because Americans, who are generous people and interested in self-improvement, might baulk at being told that they’re spending their money to be denigrated and ridiculed.  So the art world comes up with lovely phrases such as “social mobilism,” which not only serve as a cover for a deep cultural animosity, but also make the self-styled art class feel special.

Keeping in mind the art world’s deep hostility to America, it’s hardly surprising that one of the most recent exhibits to hit the art world celebrates graffiti or, as some of us still call it, vandalism.  In City Journal, Heather MacDonald takes a look at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s newest exhibit, Art in the Streets — or to cut through the euphemism, Scrawls on Walls that Destroy Communities:

There is no clearer example of the power of graffiti to corrode a public space than the fall and rebirth of New York’s subways. Starting in the late 1960s, an epidemic of graffiti vandalism hit the New York transit system, covering every subway with “tags” (runic lettering of the vandal’s nickname) and large, colored murals known as “pieces.” Mayor John Lindsay, an unequivocal champion of the urban poor, detested graffiti with a white-hot passion, but he was unable to stem the cancer. The city’s failure to control graffiti signaled that the thugs had won. Passengers fled the subways and kept going, right out of the city. To the nation, the graffiti onslaught marked New York’s seemingly irreversible descent into anarchy.

Yet in the late 1980s, the city vanquished the subterranean blight by refusing to allow scarred cars onto the tracks. That victory was a necessary precondition for the Big Apple’s renewal in the following decade; it was the first sign in years that New York could govern itself. Riders flooded back—by 2006, 2 million more passengers each day than in the eighties. The subway’s rising ridership was a barometer of the city’s rising fortunes.

What could be more artistic than something that doesn’t just mock America, but that actually hurts her? That’s social mobilism in a nutshell.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

The Bookworm Turns : A Secret Conservative in Liberal Land,
available in e-format for $4.99 at Amazon or Smashwords.

UPDATE:  This will help you understand the academic world that breeds the critics and museum curators.

Last Sunday, a private San Francisco museum unveiled a new painting, billed as the world’s largest portrait mural.  The mural contains the following edifying images, all homages to the wacky City I once called home:

The colorful mural by acclaimed artist Guy Colwell features Speaker Nancy Pelosi lancing a Republican elephant; a Terminator-dressed Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger patting the back of a grizzly bear; Senator Dianne Feinstein waving the California State flag; Mayor Gavin Newsom performing a same-sex marriage ceremony; former Mayor Willie Brown brandishing a freshly pressed suit; former Board of Supervisors President Angela Alioto donning angel wings outside the Porziuncola Chapel in North Beach (an endeavor Pritikin helped to promote); a singing former Supervisor Tony Hall; former Supervisor Harvey Milk waving a Castro Rainbow flag with former Mayor George Moscone by his side; actress Marilyn Monroe hugging baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio on the back of a giraffe; San Francisco Chronicle scribe Herb Caen; actress Carol Channing; Emperor Norton; Jerry Garcia; topless stripper Carol Doda; Willie Mayes and Mark Twain, as well as the Zodiac killer, Jim Jones and Huey Newton – all set against an iconic San Francisco skyline.  (Emphasis mine.)

Color me oh-so-naive about the sophisticated art world, but I think a painting that celebrates a City’s heritage by showing a politician brutally, albeit metaphorically, killing her duly elected opponents in a democratic two-party system, and that highlights a serial killer, a mass murderer, and a murderous thug, just lacks the eternal charm that you’d find in, say, a Da Vinci, Van Eyck, or Rembrandt.

Perhaps, though, the painting is just a part of a greater whole, as the museum boasts these other gems, as well:

The mansion also features a few shockers including an Adolf Hitler gallery containing the Fuhrer’s personal world globe and his Swastika armband acquired by two American soldiers at the end of World War II. The authenticated items “are a chilling reminder of the horrendous crimes committed by the most heinous of history’s despots,” Pritikin remarked. The Hitler gallery appropriately displays a large disclaimer that reads: “May the bastard rot in hell.”

In another room, perhaps the most shocking of all, is a working electric chair, complete with a death-row inmate dummy that sizzles and shakes at the flip of the executioner’s switch.

Considering the art world’s Leftism, it can’t be a coincidence that, despite the worst recession in decades, art agencies just got their highest funding in 16 years.   After all, if you were on the Left, wouldn’t you want to fund people like the Chief of the National Endowment for the Arts, who is not only someone whose paycheck has a lot to do with American taxpayers, but who also is a man who thinks Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar.   (I’m not a sufficiently good parodist to take on that one, although others, fortunately, are.)

Glancing at New York Times this morning told me that Obama used his presidential prerogative to borrow a whole bunch of paintings to furnish his new home.  I didn’t look at the article or the paintings, though.  Turns out I should have.

Hat tip:  Sadie

I’ll comment just briefly on this story about a Belgian production of Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila,” which casts modern Jews as the Philistines, Palestinians as the Hebrews and Samson as a suicide bomber.  My comment:  this is the typical “artistic” crap that emantes from the Left (whether non-Jewish or self-loathing Jewish) in an effort to “shock” people into seeing some politicall correct “truth.”  It’s not new, it’s not creative, it’s not artistic, it’s not meaningful.  It’s shallow, stupid and has the potential to be very harmful.

But then again, I don’t like modern “art.”