can’t get there from here – Kroger bakes art

Kroger wants to do right by their customers, wants to give them what they want at a fair price, but they get tired – tired of people complaining about the bread. It’s refined and processed, reduced to the lowest common denominator for taste and nutrition, and has no personality at all – like cotton candy that turns to paste when you touch it to your mouth. Sick and tired of hearing it, so they decided to give those so-called art bakeries, the ones producing traditional breads with character, texture, and taste, a run for the customer’s money. Deep in stainless steel labs late into the night they tested and baked until they had an array of breads to rival any family-owned, neighborhood bakery. There were seeded tops and different shapes, all looking really diverse and wonderful, but all made from the same regular old white bread dough. All the different kinds of bread tasted the same, and not a bit better than their regular bread. They found the look, they had the technology, but they couldn’t produce a good loaf of bread.

The very process of finding and funding public art provides the look of art, the sensation of something new, but it’s a generic, one size fits all, bleached of meaning copy product – glitzy and clever on the outside, but all the same white bread on the inside. It isn’t anyone’s fault – it’s the process. Constructing cool stuff to conform to guidelines and parameters, figuring markups and materials, delivery dates and installation constraints turns artists into culture vendors and fills a city up with things that eventually rust, fade, and collect debris. Does it add to the quality of life – maybe. Mediocre in gives mediocre out – it’s like a law or something. Artists line up to receive a drop of public money, in the form of direct commissions from city or state, or the tax-deductible sponsorship of business, while myriad non-profits grow glossy. The city is left with stuff to maintain forever and ever, or until the thrill is gone.

It isn’t the art that’s the problem – it’s the backward set of priorities that puts it there on the corner, in the median. The Picasso in Chicago (see prior post, July 4), often cited as an iconic example of public art, wasn’t chosen by committee, wasn’t paid for with public money, didn’t fit anyone’s parameters.