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(L) Takashi Murakami, October 26, 2007, L.A. MOCA
(R) Takashi Murakami Louis Vuitton Boutique in MOCA for duration of Murakami Retrospective Exhibit |
If you read the headlines, the papers, the news, you know that our most hallowed institutions have been shamed by scandals that started with a violation of the public trust.
The Catholic church in America enabled child molesters to operate simply by moving them to other parishes when they were publicly accused.
Major League Baseball, the national past time, has seen its most revered accomplishments fall to players who have used synthetic substances to alter their physical strength and turn flyouts into homeruns and fastballs into un-hittable pitches.
So this is happening everywhere, not just art, so our respected institutions of art and culture should not be immune from becoming whorehouses. Where there was once the exhibition of publicly owned artworks and where private foundations were dedicated to highlighting and preserving the best of culture, well, there now is a Louis Vuitton store IN the museum (really, this is not a metaphor, there is a store with salespeople and cash registers – separate and exclusive from the MOCA store itself) without a shred of pretense that it is anything but a well-lit booth in a mall. Artist Takashi Murakami designed some Vuitton bags and therefore it is art because he is an artist – this is the infantile, sinister logic of a compromised, cash-starved institution.
Where the bookstores were almost trinket-free and filled with sustaining picturebooks and deep texts, we now have limited edition prints for sale, artist-endorsed pillows, skateboards, and the like. And this is at the museum bookstore, not the separate Vuitton boutique (MOCA employees don’t even get a discount at the Vuitton boutique, not that their salaries could afford them a Murakami-LV handbag).
People still throw money in the collection plate. People still go to baseball games. And people will still go to MOCA, and the artists who show there will have their name and fame positively amplified by having been on the walls there.
Oh, and by all means, go see the Murakami show – for it is certainly a spectacle, although it is NOT art – unless Disneyland, too, is art. If Disneyland is art, then MOCA is foolish to charge such a low admission. If Disneyland is art, its Alice in Wonderland and Winnie The Pooh rides utterly destroy the Murakami exhibition on every level – from their fantastic psychedelia to their paradox of childhood innocence broached by intimacy. But MOCA does have cleaner bathrooms than the Disney parks.
After you have visited the Takashi Murakami show, this bombastic, empty plastic palace of sterile child abuse, caucasian humiliation and Hyper-capitalism making even Beijing envious, well you can say you saw it.
And you can forever look MOCA director Jeremy Strick right in the eyes and call him a WHORE.
You can look MOCA curator Paul Schimmel in the eyes and call him a WHORE.
You can look at anyone associated with the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art with the same tittilation and disgust that you would aim toward Heidi Fleiss were she to walk in the room.
Maybe the priests were always sucking altar boy dick. Maybe Babe Ruth and Willie Mays popped pills. Maybe museums have always been a money laundering fence for the pretensious wealthy. But there has always been shame as a tool that society uses to police those who shatter our collective social agreements for their own vanity and gain.
So, shame on you MOCA.
MOCA has whored it out so shamelessly this time that the difference between a streetwalker and a brothel can now be defined as the clean, well-lit space on First and Alameda in Downtown Los Angeles. Whores and hucksters there will jerk you off all day – in the name of art, but in the spirit of slave-trading capitalism. Shackles optional, Roundeye Relcome.