Art Schmart, let’s have lunch

Riehlworld has posted some pictures – and a downloadable pdf of the whole collection – from the Austrian Art Project that has some folks up in arms.

I think, as art, this stuff is only average stuff. A burka made from an American flag – oh, wow, how daring and original! A bikini-waxed woman wearing a UN symbol over her crotch. Yawn.

I did think the “Empire on, Empire off” was clever, but it’s only clever when looked at from the perspective of people who like to accuse the Bush administration of Imperial ambitions, and those are people who seem not to know what EMPIRE means. Hint: It does not mean liberating a country in order to help it establish soveriegnty and its own freely-elected government, so you can get the hell out of there in due course.

So, really, it’s only clever if you’re so bigoted as to be willfully stupid. Whatever.

Art can be world-changing. Art can topple governments. Art can change a heart – but in order to do that, art has to be several things. First and foremost, it must be TRUE. A woman in a burka made from the US flag, when Muslim women are being liberated as never before under a US president, screams out many things, but it does not scream out truth. Nor does the “Empire” piece. Nor the menage-a-trois of Elizabeth II, President Bush and Jacques Chirac, which has some people scandalized, though I can’t think why. Don’t be afraid of art. At least, don’t be afraid of this art. Yes, it may be art, but it is poor art, art on the intellectual level of 13 year olds. It is neither true nor sophisticated nor intellectual. It will last as long as you look at it, and then it will disappear. So much for European “art” these days.

More interesting to me than any of these pieces is this story about how ABC news reported on it and referred to Austria as AUSTRALIA. But…but…the Mainstream news organizations are supposed to be smarter than the blogs, right? And more careful? With all those layers of editors and gatekeepers and super-educated J-school graduates?

Bareknuckled Politics is also covering the art show.