Threnody

                           

                             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.