One Man's Trash...

Is Another Man's Objet d'Artes

We begin with a riddle.

Q. If someone holds a bee in their hand, what is in their eye?

A. Beauty. Because Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder, (bee-holder.)

You’ll laugh at that later. A good friend of mine sent the following BBC article to me.

Dutch museum finds beer can artwork in bin

LAM museum

A Dutch museum had to pick artwork out of the bin after a member of staff thought that the display, which consisted of two empty beer cans, was leftover rubbish.

“All The Good Times We Spent Together” by French artist Alexandre Lavet shows two dented beer cans on the floor. They were exhibited inside the museum’s lift as if left behind by construction workers.

However, a closer look "reveals that these dented cans were meticulously hand-painted with acrylics", the LAM museum in Lisse said.

But a lift technician thought the art was simply the leftovers of lazy visitors and threw them in the bin.

Once a curator spotted that the artwork was missing, staff were tasked with searching for it, the museum said on its website.

Eventually it was discovered in a bin bag and "miraculously, both cans were found intact", it said.

The cans were cleaned and placed at the museum's entrance.

Despite the mishap, the museum says it "bears no ill will towards the lift technician who made the mistake", who was covering for someone who is "well acquainted with the building and its exhibits".

“The theme of our collection is food and consumption,” said Sietske van Zanten, the museum’s director.

“Our art encourages visitors to see everyday objects in a new light. By displaying artworks in unexpected places, we amplify this experience and keep visitors on their toes.”

LAM museum

Uh-huh. Yep. Sure. Whatever you say. Great Ghosts of Andy Warhol! Beer can art. What’s next? Soup can art? Repeating images of Marilyn Monroe in garish colors? We’ll come back to that.

First, a story from the book of shan’alk.

Shannon and I once went to a “soft-opening” of a new art museum, Mass MoCA, a northern extension of NYC’s Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, MA. North Adams was once an important blue-collar industrial town, making everyday stuff that people everywhere used without giving much thought to where it came from. Falling on hard times, a notch in the Industrial Rust Belt, North Adams became a shell of itself, a ghost town awaiting a new purpose. As is often the case, enter the artists. Abandoned buildings became affordable loft spaces where artists could live and work in community with like-minded souls willing to exchange the bright lights of big cities for practicality. Eventually, as the new bohemia took hold, the word spread and soon a sprawling industrial park became the home of a spiffy new art museum / performance venue. Bingo, MassMOCA was born. We went to see what all the fuss was about.

A “soft-opening” is where the kinks are identified and (hopefully) worked out before the politicians and hoi-polloi come for the official ribbon cutting, self-congratulatory grandstanding photo ops. Finger-food is circulated by other struggling artists in white shirts and black pants. Everyone has a grand time without having to actually look at the art. This was not that. No. This was the Lead-up to that.

A compadre from my LaMama days, (lighting designer Blu) once said, “It must be art ‘cuz I don’t understand it.” I’m afraid that, try as I might to understand “it”, I often come down on the side of Blu. I’ll walk around and view a thing from all sides, above and below, squint my eyes, soften my focus, sit with it, and still scratch my head and wonder WTF. I’ll doubt myself, confront my judgement, yet walk away shrugging. A red dot in the center of an otherwise large blank canvas, is still, well… you know… a red dot in the center of an otherwise large blank canvas.

Now don’t get me wrong, most Dutch Masters, whether portraiture, or still life, leave me just as cold as “arte moderne”. I can appreciate the light play on the subject’s face, even as the pinched expression of the Duke or Grand Dame seems to suggest someone nearby has farted but they must not move or Rembrandt will put a mustache on the Duchess’s kisser. I can. Fat little cherubs, gruesome depictions of our suffering Lord, and dead bunnies hanging on a meathook with a bowl of fruit nearby to tease the hapless rabbit, ditto. Dada’s urinals? I still don’t know why they were pissed when I peed in it. Is a urinal still a urinal when it’s an objet d’art?

Give me a nice Impressionist or Surrealist. Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Dali’s epic melting time pieces. Seurat’s pointillism. Gauguin. Monet, Manet… money. Hudson school… now there’s light play! But please don’t get me started on soup cans or the aforementioned repeating Marilyns. The fact that a towhead poofter poseur co-opted the greatest music store of all time, the famous Volkwein’s of my childhood, where I wandered it’s multi-floored hallowed halls of music and instruments in old world splendor, leaves me bereft and apoplectic.

But I digress. As Shan and I wandered the ginormous expanse of Mass MOCA, following the site-map through darkened rooms of installations and things that seemed could only have been made by a five-year-old, (and a not particularly talented one at that,) we came across the sculpture garden. Ah-hah! Surely, there’d be a Rodin; a Giacometti, to feast our eyes on. But in the courtyard said to house the museum’s sculpture collection, there stood only a pile of industrial scrap pushed into a corner; detritus left over from the ongoing conversion of factory to art museum. It was, after all, still a “soft opening.” They’d get to the sculpture by and by. I’ll admit, I was disappointed, and it must’ve showed a little.

So when a staff member asked how we were enjoying our time suspended in a green jello mold of modern art, I confessed I was underwhelmed. But I did promise to come back to see the sculpture garden when it opened. She looked at me quizzically. “But, sir, the sculpture garden is open,” she assured me. I assured her it was not. “May I see your map for a moment?” she asked, snatching it away from me, the none too bright second-grader on a field trip that has been left behind. Intentionally. “Look, you’re here,” she said, “and the sculpture garden is here,” drawing a line with a multi-colored fingernail to the place we’d recently vacated.

We went back. It must be just around the corner from where we’d looked. We’d simply not traveled far enough.

And then, we were back. Clearly, this soft opening was intended for the staff to learn where things were, (or not,) as well as the exhibits in progress, (or not).

Nearby, we noticed a large earth-moving Tonka toy. Two burly union men sat in its cab, idling, eating their lunch and shootin’ the breeze. They looked at us, bemused by these two goofs, lost in art appreciation. I walked over to them. Could these gentlemen, I wondered, be kind enough to direct us to the sculpture garden?

“You’re here,” said burly man 1. “You’re there,” corroborated burly man 2. I looked around, more confused than ever.

“It’s right over there!” they said, pointing to the mountain of industrial waste in the corner.

“But, but, but…” I buttered. I mean, sputtered.

He explained. When the former occupants, the foundries and tool-die shops and metal-working etc., operations had shut down, a lot of hardworking men and women lost their jobs, their livelihoods, left to flounder in a quag of mortgages, college educations, broken dreams and promises. Mass MoCA, in an inspired burst of true creative kindness and inclusivity had retained as many as they could to help in the transition. These two gentlemen, aided by this behemoth of earth-moving potential had been hired and instructed to push any scraps and heaps they found lingering into this massive pile; to “sculpt” it into whatever it, and they, wanted it to be.

“We used to be factory workers!” one exploded. “Now, we’re artists!”

Boy, did we feel like rubes. Country bumpkins. Couldn’t even recognize art, when if it had teeth, it would’ve bitten us. Rauschenberg, Pollock, Basquiat. McGough and McDermott. Schnabel, Duchamp, Piss-Christ, and yes, even that shyster / magician Warhol, (Warhola in his true Pittsburgh avatar), all, all, all, were laughing at us. Laughing all the way to the Banksy.

Untitled, Basquiat

Marilyns, Warhol

PISS CHRIST, Andre Serrano - Hear what art critic, Sister Wendy, has to say about it.

Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. I rest my case.

Dali - The Persistence of Memory. Ditto.

And now, a word about last week’s posting, LETTER FROM REMEDIOS,

It seems some of my readership took umbrage with my assessment of the onslaught of tourism in Cuba in general, and of Road Scholar, in particular.

Let me assure any elder adventurers that may be thinking to avail themselves of this excellent organization’s offerings, you can do so in complete and utter confidence that you will likely be satisfied. The company has been around forever and is the very soul of professionalism. You will be expertly, tenderly guarded and guided from the moment you leave your door to the moment you return, by folks who care for your comfort, the quality of your educational experience, and most of all, your safety. They do a masterful job of handling every detail and when problems arise, as they will, (you must remember the root of “travel” is “travail” - Latin for trouble), they are solved as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible.

The source of my discomfiture had more to do with the fact that this gorgeous, albeit cursed country, with its beautiful, innocent people, had been inundated too quickly by too many people all wanting to get there at the same time. When the ice began to thaw between the two neighbors, we gringos were chomping at the bit to get there. And organizations like Road Scholar rushed in to fill the need.

But Cuba, and its infrastructure, was not quite up to the task of receiving this invasion. And make no mistake, an invasion it was, albeit a very different sort from the Bay of Pigs. To be sure, this kind of cultural invasion was a far better intended leap from the days of mobsters and presidents converging on Havana for the booze, and the broads, and the gambling. But it could’ve, should’ve, might’ve been handled a little slower, and gentler, and more mindfully.

I remain eternally grateful to Road Scholar. I would never have gotten there without them. I was, am, and always will be grateful to them for making it happen. Forgive me if my grumbling seemed disparaging.

And now, let us refresh ourselves with music.

I was letting my iTunes run at random the other day when this little ditty came up. And it made me smile.  So I went to see what it was. It sounded familiar, but was unknown to me. When I saw who it was, I smiled even more.  It was a little improv that my buddy Phil McArthur and I did one day lookin’ for musical ideas that might be developed and built upon.  I love when that happens. Being genuinely surprised and pleased by yourself is a very nice feeling.  For later reference, we’d ID’d the track as LINUS, I guess because something about it brought the ol’ Vince Guaraldi classic to mind.

Anyway, I thought it might give youse guys a little smile, too.

One more before we leave Cuba, something to accompany your Cuba Libré. Or maybe your daiquiri, said to have been created by the macho of machos, Papa Hemingway, in a bar in Havana called El Floridita. Here is a sexy little number called CHAN-CHAN, from the mega-hit Ry Cooder produced album, BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB. Disfruta!

Thanks as always for reading and listening. ང་ནི་ཨ་ཨར་ཅི་ཡིན། (I am Alki in Tibetan. No idea what that sounds like, but it sure looks purty!)