The Man Deserves Better

    In case you missed it, a statue was unveiled in Boston last month in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The statue was said to be based on a photograph of Dr. and Mrs. King embracing in 1964 after the announcement he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The unveiling of said statue took place in Boston Common, America's oldest public park, where Dr. King had given a speech to a crowd of approximately 22,000 people in April 1965. The unveiling of what has been titled, "The Embrace,” did not go as planned.  

    The work was commissioned by the city of Boston and a non-profit organization called "Embrace Boston." The organization's stated mission is "to dismantle structural racism through our work at the intersection of arts and culture, community, and research and policy." This goal is further specified as: 

"Activate arts and culture to reimagine and recast cultural representations of language, images, narratives, and cognitive cues to interrupt and reimagine the public's conventional wisdom about race in which White privilege and racial disparities are perceived as normal and disconnected from history and institutions." [emphasis in the original]

Well, now. I don't have the first damn clue what the above paragraph means. I've placed a composite of the original photograph and the statue purportedly based on that photograph, below. You tell me if the statue is "interrupting and reimagining the public's conventional wisdom about race...etc., etc., etc."

    When an art professor during my freshman year in college asked me how I would describe the class "Introduction to Ancient Egyptian Art", I replied, "Hi, I'm Art Farouk!" Pretty good, huh? Anyway, while not being an expert by any means, I have come to appreciate art a little more as I've aged. Here's what I think I know or at least, what I believe: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and DaVinci are better than Andy Warhol. And the statue you see above is a gross distortion of a wonderful photograph that diminishes its subjects.

    I mean, you can take a photograph like that and do one of two things: You can do what they call "figuration" and make it look similar while taking a little artistic license. I'm guessing the family, the art world, and dopes like me would have loved it and said what a nice way to memorialize Dr. King and his wife, Coretta. But no...Mr. Thomas had to go all in on "post-modern", "I'm smarter than everyone else", and/or "I'm going all-in on my woke sensibilities whether they like it or not!" He chose concept over form. And when you do that; when you don't give your audience any hint what you're trying to say or what your work actually is, then it becomes a Rorschach test and people are going to fill in the blanks just like they do with the ink-blots. As one art critic put it, "It is the sculptor's job to design a work that enables viewers to deduce its overarching meaning, without ending up in the interpretational cul-de-sacs."

    The thing you see above cost $10 million! And while everyone clapped...sort of...when it was unveiled (no doubt, they were too polite to yell, "What the f*** is that!"), the response from the art world (again, people much smarter than me about art) was great. THEY HATED IT! They killed this guy in the press, on Twitter, on late-night talk shows... EVERYWHERE! C'mon, be honest; the first thing you and me and everyone else thought of when they saw this "work of art" was an engorged penis embraced by loving female hands. Some even likened it to cunnilingus being performed by a bald guy. Or both! Even Coretta Scott King's cousin got in on the act, writing an article in a local San Francisco publication titled, "Masturbatory 'Homage' to My Family" and referring to the sculpture as a "major dick move (what a great line!) that brings very few, if any, tangible benefits to struggling black families..." Ah, and here is where the rubber meets the road, or the chisel meets the marble, as it were. Art supporting a political position.

    Mr. Thomas is an artist for whom his work must be political. He has founded a political action committee and his relationship with progressive politics is unambiguous. He says the purpose of this PAC is a way "to promote the critical work artists are doing by framing political speech, because we know that when you say something is 'political' it implies there's something at stake." That sounds interesting...if you're one of those dopes on The View. That said, I would rather have artists enter politics (which is their right) than to have them inject politics into their art. Because then, you just have boring, if not, unintelligible art.

    Nearly 50 years ago, an art critic who was very influential in New York and around the world talked about this very thing. At the time (the mid-1970s), artists were also enthralled with the idea of their art being political, or it meant nothing at all. Clement Greenberg railed against this idea like Peter Hall rails against the idea of Harry Potter being good literature! According to Greenberg, when the content takes over and the medium loses its purity, the result is a paltry artwork that could only fool an audience outside its respective field. 

    The artist's mandate is to make art driven by aesthetic concerns, not political aspirations: and while Greenberg recognized that "there are more important ends in life than art" he maintained that an artist's only aspiration should be to "make the best art." Greenberg had no interest in making the world a better place...just making the best art possible. This attitude probably wouldn't be very popular today as people seem to live for all politics to be personal, but Greenberg refused to yield even in his later years. "Those who make political art contribute neither to politics, nor to art...neither politics nor art have received anything from the elucubrations of these people."

    Ironically, this time the anger and judgement over "The Embrace" comes not only from other "art people" or the ivory tower, as it were, but from the "huddled masses"...meaning dopes like me! The public's response is genuine and heartfelt, and cannot be blamed on elitism. One of the original criticisms of "The Embrace" was that it had reduced the Kings to a meme. If true, that is more than sad. Martin Luther King, Jr. is an American hero, deserving of all the accolades he receives...from having a national holiday in his honor, to being memorialized in song and sculpture. He, more than anyone in the 20th century, forced America to raise its sights and its thought processes in order that we might find the promised land of the Founding Fathers' words and dreams. Like Abraham Lincoln before him, he helped us aspire to "the better angels of our nature." And while some have turned from his admonition that we should be judged by the "content of one's character and not the color of one's skin," as a society we are closer than we were (though with plenty of road to travel). And the revulsion leveled at "The Embrace" proves that for all of our faults, our society is not yet ready to be represented by a meme. 

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com