The Case Against Museums

We worry too much about our museums! (Have I lost my mind?) How can an 85 year old life long museum haunter shriek such a plea 75 years after he started becoming an art freak? The answer is easy: there are much more important things than a spectacular headline-making museum. Poverty, family disintegration, plutocracy, even more several billions people more and more exposed to bodily and mental sicknesses.

Let me begin with the so-called Bilbao effect. Bilboa was wasting away in Spain until American starchitect Frank Gehry perpetrated his titanic titanium scribble, his computer generated curiosity against the Catalan sky and upper class tourists started filing in from across the world. (It’s more significant that Lord Foster humanized their subway system as a social asset that benefits the lower classes in their surge to find work.)

Remember the Barnes uncivil war in Philadelphia. A self-made poor boy amassed a fortune that he used to make the greatest personal collection of Modernist art in the twentieth century.(It’s not insignificant that his innovation was a drug that controlled venereal diseases, always more rampant among the poorest. Or that he put his black factory workers and their white equivalents as those to be educated in his museum.) The Victorian snobs who were destroying Philadelphia as they grabbed their gold and then fled to the Mainline to bask in their benign destruction of the greater society.

This ignorant crowd eventually caught up with the avant-garde poor boy made good and then robbed his collection and dragged it to the ironically entitled Benjamin Parkway to hype Center City tourism. Museum freaks are not the cognoscenti of modern industrial culture. They just have the income and free time to enliven their lives in ways which the 47 percent of the American population can’t afford….yet. “Flourishing” museums existing with millions of the impoverished is a culture to be ashamecd of!

The Reaganesque declaration that it was “Good Morning” in America because the few could be free to become billionaires should stand as a permanent self-degradation. Only fair sharing is worthy of a pioneering egalitarian society. The coexistence of a museum boom in Philly with the visible disintegration of the society at large is fatuous self delusion. That this is not common everyday discourse is grievous evidence of the corruption of our politics by the “United Citizens” legal malarkey. 

Let me assume our Supreme Court finds good reasons for it more autocratic judgments.

All conscious citizens have perceived that the poor blacks and Hispanics as well as the rest of the proletariat are by their birthrates outpacing the wealthy. Eventually, the poor will win more and more power by their voting majorities and the rich will lose their hegemony. What to do? Control the elections with irresistible billions. The same television that illiterizes the masses will be financed to lie their way to success in more and more expensive election. What LBJ did in 1965 will eventually be eventually rejected by an unbalanced conservative Supreme Court. Money talks. Big Money destroys. 

 

When Ike warned us in 1960 that the military industrial complex would destroy US he already noted that every congressional district had a military expenditure. It will not be easy to reverse their destructive power.