I’m as cynical as the anyone about the entire holiday thing. To me, it’s a haphazard amalgam of hedonistic rituals thinly wrapped in semi-religious trappings. That said, it’s not like I’m looking at this completely from the outside. I’ve fully participated in all aspects of that “trade” and so I have no illusions about my previous role in it. These days I play along to a certain degree, and when I’m at my most tolerant I look at the situation as a creative way to hold back the dark. I’m sure at some point in history these events served a real purpose, on a personal, social and even cultural level. But along the way, those rituals have become, for the lack of a better word – contorted. Anybody that’s paying attention can see it plainly. Not that it’s a bad thing in all situations, mind you, but the juxtaposition of high holy days with lavish parties, over-spending, over-eating and binge drinking goes beyond mere irony for me.
I write all of this to provide context for the offense I took at an art exhibit I recently attended. It was a fairly substantial walk-through piece at a major gallery here in LA – and I dare not name the venue or the exhibition in this post for fear of them coming after me for publishing pictures from it. If you look at some of my blog entries near the date of this posting, you’ll probably figure out the venue. As skeptical as I am about “the holiday season” I’m doubly so about “contemporary art”. I keep going to modern art exhibits in hopes that something will catch my eye in an aha moment. And perhaps that’s the challenge of contemporary art – none of it has been filtered by history. Such as it is, there’s some level of expectation that something will jump out as having artistic merit, even if it’s simply through the primary filter of the curator making some reasonable decisions as to what’s worthy of being on the gallery floor. Instead, the show made a short run from flimsy artistic surrender to ham-handed sensationalism. That was no more apparent than a Christmas-themed exhibit where an array of decorated fake Christmas trees were surrounded by a series of large photos of a creepy Santa caricature in various stages of disgusting attire/undress.
Defiled Christmas trees and toy dolls. OK, you don't like Christmas - I get it - but where's the art?
Santa with his "junk" hanging out - cropped in my photo to protect the innocent and guilty alike
So scuffing up a bunch of fake Christmas trees and defiling toys and placing them on a dingy pedestal counts as art these days? Really? I suppose that wasn’t quite enough, so the whole dirty-Santa-with-his-junk-hanging-out is what merited being part of the show. Sheesh. There are a million ways to point out the myriad absurdities of the winter holiday season, and this was the best thing they could come up with? I mean, seriously – give a half-dozen gang-bangers a few cans of spray paint to tag up the Christmas decoration section of the local home store and you’d get a more resonant artistic statement than this.
There’s more “art” in a Japanese Taco poster in Little Tokyo than in this entire museum.
