Reading about retirement of the director of Boston Museum
of Art[Grumpy Art Historian]sent
me to thinking around the subject of changes made to nearly all American museums.
In the last 30 or so years museums have changed as if the very concept of those institutions
demanded improvements, adjustments to fit
the eye-popping changes outside of the museums. To see the nature of
these changes one has to visit say, Detroit Institute of Art and contemplate
their collection.
Rachel Ruysch, floral still life in Detroit Institute of Art
The people who built Detroit and their museum
succeeded in creating very prosperous metropolis of American industriousness,
proud yearning for high culture and the museum was among the resources of it.
Saturated, satiated with the sense of ascending spirituality, displays of almost
unearthly workmanship and vertiginous heights
of refinement shown there one stands at
the steps and takes in the radical contrast of the world outside.
Dystopian necropolis
of burned, gutted expanses of savage
destruction is not the cemetery of our civilization
but stands as the
vanguard of new era so well depicted by the African-American
artist from Detroit,pictured below. A new country is bit by bit
unveiling
itself. Its name will be Kakopolis.You would be perhaps
surprised knowing that Haiti is setting its colonies inside of
America : Detroit,Gary,Newark,Memphis,Baltimore,Saginaw,East
Saint Louis,New
Orleans and fifty more urban disasters are
festering like necrotic lesions
across the country. There is no way
to accept them as some more of the “vibrant
diversity” that
contributes to the richness of American mosaic. To any
common-
sense people it would be inescapably clear that we have a clash of
two
extremely different civilizations. Because there was no will to
see it as
conflict,as culture war ,nothing was done to save ,to defend our world against
the march of savagery.
Returning back inside of the museum one has to
notice that horrors of urban blight have its ugly twin among the contemporary collection.
What was meant to be a repository of the highest achievements of our contemporary
art turned into elevated promotion of visual retardation, moronic displays of barbarity.
Somehow and sadly there is an unwelcome balance of two betrayals: one outside,
of urban savagery and another inside of the museum, of the Stupid Art.
Gilda Snowden ,"Monument"-What a perfect match with Detroit.
