Art Is Laughing at Us, and I Laugh Back

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is getting a new addition: a 340-ton boulder that will be suspended over a 456-foot slot dug into the earth. Today, the LA Times documents the mind-boggling logistics and expense of moving this piece of commonplace granite from a quarry in Riverside to a Wilshire Boulevard trench:

If all this seems excessive, the artist’s assistant, Tim Cunningham, is quick to play devil’s advocate. “I’ve found it amusing from what I’ve read in the press about the expense, the naysayers. It’s as viable as any other public works project,” he insists. “And this is creating jobs above and beyond the aesthetic appeal — for Emmert, the riggers, the truckers, the utility guys working overtime — and the country needs jobs.”

So that’s where we are: art as a jobs program. LACMA itself, of course, takes the usual turgid and pretentious art museum approach toward its new baby: “Taken whole, Levitated Mass speaks to the expanse of art history, from ancient traditions of creating artworks from monolithic stone, to modern forms of abstract geometries and cutting-edge feats of engineering.”

At this point, I think these guys are all just laughing at us. Apparently, we’re now willing to spend 10ドル million to haul a rock a hundred miles, plop it down in front of a building, and pretend that we’re saying something profound. I guess I’d laugh too if someone were willing to pay me that kind of money to create, say, a room filled with 340 tons of blank books. And why not? It would be every bit as meaningful.