The poor guide was sweating, unconfident, and at a loss for words to explain the art in the Anchorage Fine Art Museum.
On an Alaskan tour last year we escaped rain under a shelter with two women.How easy it is start conversations with strangers when one is older. “You must see the Anchorage art museum,” one says. “Their theme is the blending of Native-American and Anglo-American cultures.”
We tried it. Our guide, “Bob,” was a tall fellow with a bass voice, easy to hear and see. First stop was a room with walls and ceiling covered by 8x11 typing paper painted brown and laid in a shingle pattern. “Oh, yeah, the artist is a roofer,” I blurted.
Poor Bob. Nothing he said after that made sense. He couldn’t explain the explainable. The next room had about 300 saucers of colored sand on the floor. Bob was defeated, especially after overhearing a 50-ish lady say, “I know art. This isn’t art – this is BS” (using the full expression). There was a lean skate boarder, a Native-A guy on a 10 ft screen and endless loops of tape showing him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite. There was modern art a 5 yr old could’ve done, followed by an insane guy’s art (literally insane, he lived in an asylum). A plaque said someone was studying connections between insanity and art. If that wasn’t crazy enough, a water color painting by Texas Monthly darling Georgia O’Keefe showed her New Mexico driveway through a window. Huh, I thought this was about Alaska! Bored tour members wandered off to laugh and not make Bob’s embarrassment more than it was already.
It reminded me of a Seinfeld episode when a painting of Kramer was hanging in a gallery and two old snoots tried to make something of it.
“I sense great vulnerability. A man-child crying out for love, an innocent orphan in the post-modern world.” “I see a parasite. A sexually depraved miscreant seeking only to gratify his base urges.” “His struggle is man’s struggle. He lifts my spirit.”
There’s the problem of modern progressive art and the struggle to explain it, even to where the artist never intended to go. Maybe the explanation challenge is the issue. What’s behind Picasso’s dismembered bodies? What is the deal with welded scrap metal, too sharp for children’s climbing, in parks? Who paid for those and who dared to call them art?
People of Hays Co., this began in 18th Century Europe and on America’s NE coast with secular humanism. Established norms were degraded, truth and ethics became subjective, and God was an afterthought. Under the guise of creativity, facts didn’t matter. It’s willful insanity.
Progressivism as known by Teddy Roosevelt has turned from people’s needs and into leftist policies which are at best public inconveniences in the form of PC, Art, Manners, Gender Identity, Rewriting history… and on and on.
May this country wake up soon and heed 2 Chronicles 7:14. It’s our only hope.
That’s what I think but I could be wrong, you know.
