Recently the family decided to have a picnic in the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park. It was a beautiful afternoon and we began to examine the various sculptures in the Cordova’s garden. One was a strange burnt looking object about 20 feet tall and titled “No more cookies and cream”. “What did it mean?” I asked my brother, and he replied – “Its a burnt out girl scout’s tent. There are going to be no more cookies and cream.”
Now it made sense to me. It dawned on me, that the exhibits in this museum, were all along a similar vein – the whimsical products of an upper middle-class environment – either of the artists or of the patrons of the artists. This in a country where about 2,000 people have just died in a war that many view as needless, and in a state that is the first in the country to legalize same-sex marriage.
The contrast with the Louvre that we had visited the month before, was startling, and not because of the age or value of the art work in either place, but because of the “safe art” in the DeCordova vs. the “controversial art” at the Louvre.
When we were at the Louvre, we came to a balcony overlooking the main lobby and found that the place had been flooded by students who were doing a “lying in”. They were chanting something in French, and also had a huge banner saying something in French. There were three students next to me on the lobby and I asked them what the protest was about. They smiled enigmatically at me and repeated my question in fluent English. Then they looked at each other and laughed, but did not explain what the protest was about.
It turned out that these three were actually leaders of the protest. From the balcony, they would shout a phrase, that the other students below would respond to. There were a few policemen nearby and I ask them what the protest was about. I got the same smile and knowing looks among them. I also asked the Museum guides and got the same treatment. The other visitors to the museum appeared to be as ignorant as us as to what the protest was about.
It seemed that if one did not know what the protest was about, that then it could not be explained. Either one was “on the bus, or off the bus” and explanations were not going to help. There was one clue however and that was that the students were from an “arts college” and some how I got the impression that they were protesting the shape of the “new” Louvre – the pyramid structure created by I.M. Pei and this, well over a decade after the structure was created.
Contrast this with the safe “white bread and milk” art of the DeCordova, and one realizes that great artists make great statements with their art. They do not simply create things that are simply pretty, whimsical, or self-indulgent. Great art points to great, deep things – things that stir the soul.
Karl Jung used to paint the dreams that he had and his patients tried to get him to give an “art show” of these paintings. Jung refused. He said the paintings were not art – that simply reproducing the images of the subconscious did not create objects of art.
Picasso on the other hand, very consciously used the symbols of the subconscious as a language with which to frame issues that were both relevant to the day and timeless because both the symbols/imagery he used as well as the ideas they were conveying were timeless. This is what great artists do – phrase important issues in a way that transcends the immediate impetus for the painting. They use timeless symbols/imagery to convey the idea. A burnt out girl scout’s tent that seeks to convey the idea that there are going to be no more cookies and cream seems to me to be whimsical, not framing any important question or idea.
The art at the DeCordova is “pretty” art – not great art. The reason it is not a museum on par with the Louvre is not that it lacks money. What it lacks is the will to depict stirring art. It is the natural outcome of the background of both its backers and its visitors – privileged residents of a rich first world country, who by and large are very comfortable with the status-quo.
