(Going through old blog drafts, I found this one that I never posted. So, even though I can’t even remember now what I was doing in the Albuquerque airport … waste not, want not.)

Going through the Albuquerque and Los Angeles airports, I was glad to note that artsy types have put in installments to heighten my aesthetic sensibilities.

In Albuquerque, I was on my way from the food place to the sitting around place when I almost bumped into a pedestal. And reaching out from the pedestal was a bronze statue of a Native American with a feathered headress. He was reaching out to grab an eagle, who looked distinctly pissed off. I wouldn’t think the eagle would have had many worries. The grabber was so far over the edge of the cliff that it seems obvious that the next 20 seconds of his life would’ve been the last 20 seconds of his life. The statue was called something like “In Pursuit of Dreams.” I think a better title would’ve been “Stupid People Tricks.”

In Los Angeles, there was a temporary installment of five artists called “Travelogue.” The front of each was a typical touristy LA postcards, but the written portion on the back was talking as if the person was in someplace much more exotic and uncivilized than LA. One of them talks about bearded pigs and says:

It is awesome to experience local flora and fauna … but horrifying to be reminded how sometimes the juggernaut of unnecessary commerce can reduce natural areas to mere amusement parks and consign wildlife to the historic unknown.

So what in the world is the point? That the postcard-writer is on drugs? That LA tourists are pretending that they’re in the jungle? That people who write fatuous things about juggernauts on their postcards are mentally unstable?
The placard next to the exhibit wasn’t much help. (Placards next to art exhibits never are.)

Sample postcards imply they are from a tourist visiting Los Angeles. Contradicting that assumption is text on the back that implies they were written by someone while visiting Bahrain, Brasilia or some other distant land. Highly conceptualized, the artist’s work exploits curiosity and intellect through virtual travel, having the effect of questioning and exposing cultural tourism.

Exploits curiosity? Exposes cultural tourism? It’s not just that those words are fatuous and irrelevant, it’s that they’re seriously misjudging how life-changing an experience it is to see over-sized incongruous postcards. This is the kind of crap that artists get away with. It’s as if they said, “Looking at this exhibit, the fully actualized human should be feeling sensations of faint-headedness as his immortal soul stretches by two hat sizes. There may be some nausea as the writing on the Really Big Postcards from Someone who Thinks They’re Somewhere Else causes you to reassess everything you thought you ever knew. Unusually intelligent individuals may find that they have an immediate need to go out and do some art themselves. Really clever people may start reaching for eagles.”

Well, you risk being called a Philistine if you talk like that. I’m not saying that someone might not get something out of both the statue and the postcards. I just think that public art would be served a little better if artists spent a little less time in the company of other artists (or people who want to pretend like they might be artists) and a little more time around tired airport passengers. Art can be — and should be, IMHO — refreshing, elevating, beautiful, interesting. Artists like those currently getting funded to provide public art seem to be happy when they’ve made something that’s difficult and happier still when they’ve made something incomprehensible.