mural amnesia -- revising history

ref. “UK will cover controversial campus mural,” HL nov 24, 15

We here at owning art don’t care for messages in our art, considering them an add-on to sheer visual impact, art’s ability to attract and hold our attention for more than nano-seconds at a time. Religious paintings from a time when wealth concentrated in grand cathedrals come down to us mainly because the eternal institution has preserved them, and the really good ones make it into museums but it isn’t because of what they say. Not many museum goers bother to identify all the heavily symbolic characters, more interested in the depiction of translucent flesh and velvet drapery than heavenly announcements.

To carry that standard forward to our time, it could still be the art itself that’s most important, and not it’s ax to grind no matter how noble. After all, advertisers learned a few generations ago that superior art draws attention to their product, whatever it may be, and they pay top dollar to some very classy professionals -- everything but true love. For that reason, even in the case of fine art it’s more reliable to consider qualities which apply to all art, historic and modern, referential and abstract. Van Gogh painted a pot of sunflowers, but no one looks at it to learn about sunflowers. They look at it because it’s the most interesting thing in the room. 

On the other hand art teaches us about the world. Every documentary about a period from about a hundred and fifty on back uses art to illustrate their story. Almost everything we know and judge about previous civilizations is in the attainment of their artists, and it’s is not for nothing that despotic regimes throughout history have sought to control the minds of their subjects by limiting their art, the worst being the most severe. Somehow this brings us to our own history, about seventy five years back, and the purge of representation from art, an event significant for art and just about everybody. During the great depression the government hired artists to paint murals in post offices and public auditoriums all across the land. What they got disturbed sensitive folks in influential high places, to them a lot of left wing crap, union meetings and strikes, average citizens buying the ‘daily worker’ on a newsstand, such as that. Few survive having made way for abstract art which don’t say nothing, and that’s on purpose. Somehow the painting in Coit Tower in San Francisco made it through neglect and sabotage, and it’s murals have finally been preserved, are even being restored. coit tower murals 

The mural in question over on campus, having drawn so little attention all these years, managed to shyly stand in a corner and so survived the great destruction of WPA sentiment almost everywhere else. It can be read a couple of different ways, and acknowledging a reality which couldn’t be spoken at the time could be seen as quietly subversive, an indictment of the status quo, a clandestine nod to all those who passed by and wanted the world the change. By our universal standards this mural isn’t a particularly strong statement, and compared with the mosaics of Cincinnati’s Union Terminal it's only mediocre, but it does preserve a truth about a time and an appeal for change, and can’t we just help but wonder if these protesters are on the wrong side. Besides, this blog doesn’t trust anyone who wants to censor or destroy art.