Grossly Perverted Values: Emergency Surgery Advised

Thomas Eakins

Now that Inky art crit Ed Sozanski has declaimed on what he calls the Gross "debacle", perhaps we can examine the grossly perverted values that led to this "crisis". For generations, the movers and Quakers who have run Philly's cultural life into the ground, no one, BIG or small, peeped about the hidden scandal that as few as 500 people a year had contemplated "the greatest painting ever made in Philadelphia." And that's not vetting those gross numbers for "dupes", which is to say those Jeff workers who walked by it every day, semi-comatose to its value.

But those aren't the kind of "dupes" I want to discuss. When I was Gilbert Seldes' gofer for the then new Annenberg School, I was shocked by the cravenness of Penn officialdom vis a vis their donor, Walter. I had noted, growing up in Detroit, that Money Talks. But I had to wait until Penn hired me to learn that BIG MONEY SHUTS EVERYBODY UP. And the sycophantic way they trolled Walter to get him to leave his art collection to PMA filled me with disgust.

I had been taught that art cultivated you. Refined you. We need to refind the USA from these false Profiteers. Culture Vultures All I saw was the Grossest Hustle. And I am suffering through the greatest architectural illusion of modern industrial society: The Museum Boom! (I call it the Ka-Boom.) As the cultural elite fought each other raising the cash to finance this boom, the cities in them began falling apart. What profiteth a city if it gains a Gehry and loses its solitude.

With the exception of a few upper middle class oases, Philly is a war zone, inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their heart. And we grieve over one painting which Jeff alums originally bought in 1878 to console Thomas Eakins over the insult that the Centennial Art Committee gave him in 1876 by hiding his great canvas in a side exhibit of medical equipment.(It was too "gory" for the Culture Vultures. And then they piously canned him from PAFA for having the balls to show a nude man model to a "mixed" audience. Had they no common sense, these Fig Leafers? Have we none yet?

And now the Crocodile tears over "losing" an Eakins. What a Krock. And Sozanski should be ashamed of the scurrilous way he has demeaned Alice Walton. She is "transplanting high culture to her beloved Ozarks." She is using her 18 billion dollar inheritance to "vacuum up high-profile masterpieces whenever opportunities arise." "Bringing the National Gallery into the picture makes her seem less like a contemporary robber baron." Her ability to pay premium prices reminds Ed of how "19th-century robber barons such as J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Clay Frick built their fabulous collections. . ." But Walton isn't in "their league" (uppity old Ozark cracker that she is?)

Her Crystal Bridges Musuem "promises to supplant the Wal-Mart 5&10 Museum as Bentonville's premier cultural attraction." Ha ha ha.(Ed even sneers at it as a "boutique museum", but her architect Moshe Safdie is no Cracker: his National Gallery in Ottawa is one of the great museums of our time.) He even mocks her taste: in addition to the minor league Asher B.Durand canvas, "Kindred Spirits", she's amassed two George Washington portraits--one by Charles Wilson Peale and another by Gilbert Stuart, one of Martin Johnson Heade's South American landscape with orchids, a Winslow Homer genre scene, "and-wait for it-a classic Norman Rockwell, a boy comforting a sick puppy." End of Sneer. Heh, why doesn't Ed pick on someone his own intellectual size (or bigger?), namely, John Wilmerding, her advisor?

That Charles Wilson Peale snoot reminds me that I always used to begin my American Literature classes with a tribute to the Peale family, who deeply believed in helping create a cultural democracy in Philly, beginning with PAFA. And are we to mock Alice in her New Wondersland because she thinks Rockwell deserves a place in her parade of Americana. It was the Saturday Evening Post, a great Philly institution, that gave Norman his first national audience. In short, Sozanski's snottiness is a greater critical debacle than the Jeff sell out. And corny as well. If there is something art criticism must not be, it's corny. "Jefferson deserves all the obloquy for agreeing, in effect, to sell grandmother's wedding ring or the Medal of Honor that grandfather won at Anzio." Geezh, Ed. My eyes are watering.

In the Culture Vulture world, how fortunes are assembled is never questioned morally? Only unblinking Inky Blinquer Dan Rubin had the astuteness to suggest how many kids and/or cops that $68 million could give health insurance. Notoriously, Wal-Mart doesn't give most of its employees health insurance (even having the chutzpah to recommend to its most poorly paid "associates"--that new synonym for "slave" in Wal-Martese-that they apply for Medicaid!) And it hires as many part time employees as possible, to keep clear of full time perks.

The debacle begins in Bentonville, where these foul employment policies are noodled. We are no longer living in the Gilded Age of Morgan and Frick, we live in a new Guilt-free Gilted Age, where official policy is to make a few new Billionaires and to hell with the rest. Think for a minute where Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Eakins (no Uncle Toms, they) would stand on this Gross debacle. They would agree, I think, that we need immediate surgery, to cut away the gross ideas that are suffocating our egalitarian ideals.

Think about it, the next time you "save" money at a Wal-Mart.