Alexandra York hates modern art, and she vented her hate once again in her July 29 Newsmax column:
Yes. It really happened, this “Happening.”
Not having visited New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in ages, I recently decided to attend a private party there.
Only a couple hundred people attended the after-hours event, so I could review the “art” without tourists and with some wine to brace myself for what to experience “art-wise.” After all, I had been to the museum before and knew what to expect in principle.
Many offerings were quite a chuckle, like the paint-scratching (or scratch-painting?) maybe 20’x 30′ by a famous contemporary “artist” in the reception area where I got my first glass of warm white wine.
A notecard on the wall explained how the “artist” sat on the shoulders of his assistant, who then moved back and forth-up and down — some on a ladder, I presume — while the “artist” brushed on paint while riding the ups-and-downs-and-all-arounds of his assistant’s gymnastics.
Yes, York spent her column putting “art” and “artist” in scare quotes when they apply to the modern variety — though she couldn’t be bothered to identify the artists and works she was mocking by name. Her sneering continued:
I won’t bother describing the rooms with typical “paintings” by the to-be-expected, household names of modernism or contemporary concoctions adhered to the walls familiar to everybody, or the piles of “whatever” sculptures by “whichever” other famous names strewn about or sticking up or hanging down, with plenty of room to walk around and wonder, because what I want to tell about is the “Happening,” the evening’s piece de resistance: The map — meaning the paper map they give out at the information desk with a layout of the exhibits.
Most of the rest of her column was devoted to a crumpled version of the map on the floor in one gallery, where it allegedly couldn’t be decided if that itself was art.
But if York hates modern art so much, why bother visit MOMA in the first place? It seems like a waste of time to go to a museum just to sneer at and mock what you see. Indeed, she declared that her visit showed “the depraved state of our culture and the stuff that, unchallenged by most (including critics), passes for art in it.” Why does York think she’s the only one who is qualified to determine what art is?