It’s a commonplace today that contemporary
art is too often silly, incomprehensible, ugly, or even disgusting. But it
isn’t often that a work of art is actually considered terrifying.
Recently the hometown fans of legendary comedienne
Lucille Ball were stricken at the unveiling of a rather nightmarish bronze
statue in her honor. Rightfully nicknamed “Scary Lucy” in the media, it purports to depict Ms. Ball, who died in 1989, in
perhaps her most famous comedy routine: as a commercial pitchwoman for the unpalatable
“Vitameatavegamin.”
The statue caused such a backlash among the
outraged citizens of Ball’s birthplace of Celoron, New York that its creator actually wrote to The
Hollywood Reporter to
publicly apologize for what he called “by far my most unsettling sculpture,”
and to offer to fix it.
This prompted The Guardian’s art critic Jonathan Jones to address the bigger
picture of bad sculpture in a rant with the outstanding title, “The scourge of the bronze zombies: how
terrible statues are ruining art.” Jones declared that
it may be time to ban artists from creating statues. They have simply lost
the ability to do it. The art that once gave us Michelangelo’s David and Rodin’s Burghers of Calais has degenerated into a cynical province of
second-rate hacks who are filling up city squares, railway stations and other
public spaces all over the world with ugly, stupid and occasionally terrifying
parodies of the human form.
Don’t hold back, Mr. Jones. Tell us how you
really feel.
In addition to “Scary Lucy,” Jones went on to
name two other statues in London as examples of such “crimes against good taste,”
including the ghastly A
Conversation with Oscar Wilde near Trafalgar Square, which depicts what appears to be the decomposing
author bursting out of his coffin; a “gaunt and deathly” bust of Margaret Thatcher in the Falkland Islands; and, curiously, a statue of a raincoated Peter Falk as Detective
Columbo in Budapest, of all
places. “There’s only one thing to be said in favor of all these dire statues,”
Jones concluded. “Simply by looking at their failure, future generations may be
inspired to create better.”
What’s with the apparent epidemic of ugly
public sculptures? Jones is at a loss to explain it. After all, he wrote, “Modern
art supposedly killed off this kind of vulgar realism.” But modern – or more
precisely, postmodern – art, with its
deconstruction of the beautiful, is precisely what is to blame.
The experience of beauty, as philosopher
Roger Scruton puts it in a brilliant little must-read from 2009 called Beauty:
A Very Short Introduction,
is a reverential one in which art “points us beyond this world, to ‘a kingdom
of ends’ in which our immortal longings and our desire for perfection are
finally answered.” The yearning for beauty is our aspiration “towards the
highest unity with the transcendental,” and the most emotionally and
philosophically compelling art fulfills that aspiration.
But postmodern art represents what Scruton
calls “a flight from beauty” that no longer points us toward the sacred;
indeed, it actively seeks to desecrate the sacred. The result, he says, is the rise
of “self-consciously transgressive” works that do not engage us spiritually or
emotionally; they leave viewers cold, confused, even repulsed. “The degradation
of art has never been more apparent,” Scruton declares in his book – and as the
Guardian critic Jones noted, it’s plenty
apparent in today’s public sculpture.
What then can be done to reverse the tide of
ugly public art? For a start, we can follow the example of the people of Celoron,
New York by complaining loudly about bad art and demanding its removal. Maybe
this will begin to send a message to artists and their sponsors that we will no
longer accept fraudulence or kitsch or contempt for beauty in the public
square. Perhaps it will encourage sculptors once again to find value in beauty,
and to strive to unite us with the transcendental.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 4/22/15)
