Spring Break
Is MU art well-placed?
Anna Swain
Issue date: 4/17/09 Section: Diversions
Picture your ideal setting for a study session. Are you picturing it? Perhaps it's in a beautiful historic building filled with the hushed sounds of other students working. Now look at the walls of your ideal setting and conjure up the kind of art you would want. Got an image? Okay, now envision the horrific opposite of that art. Having trouble picturing something so horrible? Luckily, I can help you out! Just stroll over to the MU concourse and witness ghastliness of what could easily be given the "artwork least conducive to restful studying" award - a prestigious honor granted tri-annually by a 10-person committee. Or if I was in charge it would be.
Now, one of my mottos is there is a time an a place for everything, including 8-foot-tall paintings of naked (and when I say naked, I mean naked) people doing cringe-worthy sexual activities. The place for this would be in a modern art gallery, with a disclaimer about explicit content, not in a public place that children walk through weekly and is routinely used for studying or meeting with friends and professors. Do you really want to have a discussion with your professor underneath a painting of naked people in a cage? I certainly wouldn't. And I wouldn't want any child of mine seeing it. Talk about traumatizing.
The unfortunate thing is that if you take a good look at the art (which I don't recommend if you value your sanity), it's clear the artist has skill. There are a couple of paintings on the far left that are of buildings, and the technique in these is very good. I actually like them. The rest of the pieces, however, are drenched in thinly-concealed political symbolism. The metaphors are cliché at best, and disrespectful at worst. The artist has taken the emblems of the U.S. and twisted them in an intensely offensive way. I'll be the first to admit that the United States' current foreign policy has issues, but aren't there better ways of expressing this than by demonizing the men and women of the armed forces by portraying them trampling "peace" and the flag into the ground? I think there are.
Anna Swain
diversions@dailybarometer.com
Now, one of my mottos is there is a time an a place for everything, including 8-foot-tall paintings of naked (and when I say naked, I mean naked) people doing cringe-worthy sexual activities. The place for this would be in a modern art gallery, with a disclaimer about explicit content, not in a public place that children walk through weekly and is routinely used for studying or meeting with friends and professors. Do you really want to have a discussion with your professor underneath a painting of naked people in a cage? I certainly wouldn't. And I wouldn't want any child of mine seeing it. Talk about traumatizing.
The unfortunate thing is that if you take a good look at the art (which I don't recommend if you value your sanity), it's clear the artist has skill. There are a couple of paintings on the far left that are of buildings, and the technique in these is very good. I actually like them. The rest of the pieces, however, are drenched in thinly-concealed political symbolism. The metaphors are cliché at best, and disrespectful at worst. The artist has taken the emblems of the U.S. and twisted them in an intensely offensive way. I'll be the first to admit that the United States' current foreign policy has issues, but aren't there better ways of expressing this than by demonizing the men and women of the armed forces by portraying them trampling "peace" and the flag into the ground? I think there are.
Anna Swain
diversions@dailybarometer.com
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