Thursday May 12, 2011

DEATH WISH, PART INFINITY. Heather Mac Donald was so pissed last month about the graffiti show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A. that she wrote over 9000 words against it, distributed between a news article and something she described as a review but which did not address the actual art. Her schtick was mainly catching fatuous artists and dealers being fatuous, and museum personnel preventing her from tagging the exhibit ("'You can’t write on the wall,' another guard told me"); her point was that graffiti is destructive and illegal and linked to gang activity, and thus should not be celebrated in a museum.

At the press preview, guest curator Aaron Rose announced pompously: “This is history. This moment will go down in history as one of the most important moments in the 21st century.” Rose is probably wrong about that. But Art in the Streets will be remembered as a moment when Los Angeles’s constant and heroic battle against graffiti vandalism took a hard blow to the head.

There's also a lot of Broken Windows stuff about how graffiti causes crime, much in the way that marriage causes prosperity.

Though the exhibit seems to have drawn some graffiti to the museum's own neighborhood, it is hard to imagine that the city's criminal element will read about the show in Artforum and be inspired to redouble their tagging efforts. And Mac Donald admits that New York has massively rolled back graffiti despite affectionate, nostalgic tributes to the form that one now sees even in the local tabloids. Hell, we've had museum shows about graffiti, too, which were not followed by crime waves; I saw the 2005 "East Village USA" show at the New Museum, which had a graffiti component, and that didn't spur an uptick in urban hieroglyphics. Not everybody who likes Wild Style goes out defacing property as a result.

I mention this in relation to the complaints about Common performing at the White House. The McGuffin has been some of Common's lyrics, but I get the feeling the real wellspring of their outrage is that the Obamas know some rappers. This has been a popular schtick among the brethren going back to the 2008 campaign, and the inspiration for some of their iconography.

How about that: In 2011 we still have people flipping out about rap stars and old graffiti as if they have anything to do with anything. It makes about as much sense as complaining about punk rockers and slam dancing.

When Soundscan revealed just how massive hip-hop was with different kinds of people -- including both white and black consumers -- you'd think that game would have ended; many, many Americans enjoy this brand of entertainment, and if you think that's an indictment of our age, you're really obliged to go beyond the issue of rap's ghetto-crime-drug background and think about why those fantasies are popular with people of all races who hold down jobs and have families.

Similarly, if you think graffiti is such a menace that museums should avoid it lest they unleash an 80s urban hellscape revival, you ought to ask yourself why you think merely looking at graffiti with pleasure is so dangerous -- do you really believe it's like a virus that corrupts our morality with bright colors and balloon lettering? Or that citizens will leave the show thinking, "You know, I really feel like bombing a train, let's go steal some paint"?

To even consider the racial implications of the thing is just too depressing, so I'll just go with the slightly-less-depressing observation that conservatives seem to think that Escape from New York is still in theaters, Ice-T is still on the charts, and the word "culture" exists only as a prefix to the word "war."

UPDATE. Blogger's recent crisis broke the comments link -- you can see the original comments here.