Houston's Museum of the Joke
The Shrine to Anti-Art at The Kinder Building
Houston, Texas is ugly. From afar, its three primary clusters of sharp-edged black, silver, brown and grey metallic containers of banks, oil companies, hotels and hospitals seem to have staked their ground and circled the wagons, chins belligerently jutting, pinnacled antennae stabbing the sky.
In a dystopian film of the 1970s (see my essay, Be Careful What You Wish For), these alternately gangly or obese boxes might have played as the laboratories of the pod people from the planet Zot, in which big-brained, three-eyed, claw-handed, gurgling freaks perform psychotropic experiments and playful amputations upon the screaming humans whom they have drawn in under the pretence of work in the bowels of their alien machinery. Or perhaps these buildings are their plantings, gigantic crystalline outcroppings, off of which the Zotmen feed through their retractable proboscis so that they may regenerate their lungs, which earthen air corrodes, normally used for the breathing of sulfuric acid, even as they bring to heel humankind for their psychotic Overlords?
The human animals (I'll call them manimals) kept in these otherwise non-descript, ill- or imperfectly-proportioned, dreary cages, released upon their own recognizance for compliant devotion to the Grand Plan, minus a portion of their brains, biopsied for mind control purposes, return by way of 7000 miles of traffic-teeming, badly-if-at-all-repaired asphalt woven through the forest of structures, down miracle miles of repetitively drabby-ecru resupply (shopping) plazas, and into the surrounding mushroom-like developments where they dwell in squat containers as nouveau garish as the skyscrapers whence they decamped are robotically efficient and hermetically soul-less. (Ought I to write the screenplay?)
In comparison, Boston and Manhattan still contain, despite their rapid physical (owing to spiritual) deterioration, blocks of aesthetically pleasing, even awe-inspiring buildings of sublime proportions and stunning beauty – these being the relics of a century or more ago, when ugliness was not then the prime aesthetic anti-virtue that it's become since. (See Sir Roger Scruton on The Modern Cult of Ugliness for a rousing and brief exegesis of that topic.)
Nowhere in our city is there an architectural grace or sophistication to rival: Neither in River Oaks nor in The Heights, despite the presence there of a handful of somewhat handsome homes built nearly a century ago. In fact, say it ain't so, Joe, but there is no gladness of view to be had at all because there isn't even a scenic faraway vista, like the Rockies from Denver or the Bay from San Francisco, to greet the eye.
We don't get the tourist trade here partly because there's nothing to see. I must qualify Houston's panoramic ugliness. The people of Houston, as a rule, are anything but off-putting, dull, angular, uninspired or somehow ugly. To the contrary, I have found them to be friendly, welcoming, interesting, intelligent, capable and often impressive, very much unlike the people of Boston and New York, in my experience having lived in the northeast of the US and Greater Houston for long periods of time. Houston, and Texas generally, are full of (happy) surprises – but the delight is in the people, not in our surroundings. He who looks for nourishment in examples of man-made material beauty can not find it in the constructed structures of this city.
Nor, more importantly, can one find it in the newest Houston art museum.
THE MUSEUM OF THE JOKE
The Kinder Building, purpose-built at a cost of US$450 million to house “modern art” at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, exemplifies that chip-off-the-old-block Guggenheimian flair for warehouse ugliness: A series of massive, bright white shipping containers welded at the hip like fat Siamese Quintuplets. One might expect its contents to be a server farm or a seed vault or perhaps the crematorium in the film Soylent Green (1973). (View the slideshow of the building here.) But surely, not to present art? A structure which looks like this has been designed by architects who despise humanity.
In fact, the design of the building is perfectly suited to its contents, for this is the Museum of the Joke. Its contents are not art. Not an atom of art can be found within its wall. The joke – and the joke is on you and on every witness to it who walks among its contents – is unfunny, but it is ironic. This “art” is made by “artists” who have dispensed with the achievement of Beauty, because they haven't the talent to discover it and express it; and/or because Beauty itself troubles them to such an extent, that they are driven to uglify their work in line with the ugliness that pervades their own consciousness.
THE MOCKERY OF A SHRINE TO ANTI-ART
The Kinder is yet another shrine, like the Guggenheim, to anti-art. That's all that these people – “artists,” patrons, the curatorial staff and the academic critics who provide the illusory pseudo-philosophical treatises to justify their horrendous hegemony in the halls of anti-art – have to give you: the ugliness within them has been made to display in a container as ugly as its contents. How these sad souls (if they have souls) must despise Beauty to vilify you who loves Beauty by hoping to compel you to accept as art what is not art; not only to stomach it, but to praise it with accolades justly favored upon the work of Goya, Michaelangelo, Rubens, Monet or even the Bloomsbury artists or the American ashcan school which found Beauty or order even in ugly cityscapes! A building dedicated to a curated collection of ugly, meaningless, valueless junk – obtained at very high prices – can only be described, fittingly, as Houston's most expensive junkyard.
If any place in such an ugly city ought to be an aesthetic respite from the “real world” -- its wider ken fraught with bloody battles, concentration camps, compelled toxic injections, treason, fraud, perversion, hypocrisy -- it ought to be an art museum. Across the street from the Kinder, much of the collection housed within the concrete box known as the Houston Museum of Fine Arts is, in fact, devoted to aesthetic beauty. One finds therein the balm – which is Beauty – ideal, absolute and unopposed – for the ugliness of mundaneity, the recent exhibit “Masterpieces from the Armand Hammer Collection” being but one example. But not Kinder.
Compare:
Now let's take a random walk through the Kinder Museum of Modern “Art.”
Is the turquoise archway into the tunnel the “art?” If not, why not?
How about some of these inexplicable monstrosities?
Where I’ve not named the “artist” above — or rather the anti-artist — I was simply too disgusted to stop and look for the name. I felt nauseous, impelled to flee. This is a Museum that fails to uplift: It sickens the soul.
“Heavenly Jerusalem” depicts the train tracks that took the Jews through the gates of Dachau. Is this not an ironic defilement? What is the green wash but the putrefaction of their flesh? I stared slack-jawed, amazed at the cruel negation (for this is its implication) of a heaven — or at least its questionable existence, for there is no certainty here — for those who were slaughtered. If one doesn’t give the artist the benefit of the doubt, it is as if Dachau is equated with Heaven — NO EXIT, as the awful Jean-Paul Sartre told the world, having never had the capacity to discover it — for the camp is where the tracks lead. An ironic Jerusalem for the incinerated!
Why not a depiction of the beauty of their souls rising to that Heaven? Well, why not?
Can one find that which is beauteous in a world that is so dreadfully ugly? Not if one’s consciousness admits only of material existence; which is ugliness itself. Beauty is beyond; Beauty is ideal. A genuine artist must discover it and have the skills to express it and he does it to communicate nutritious ideas for the soul of the viewer — that is why there are so few artists of the past century who are not anti-artists, because the focus of anti-art is bound by the ugliness they see and can never imagine beyond. That is why the Kinder Museum of Houston, Texas, is an abject failure in conception and execution.
Watch this clip in which Sir Roger Scruton makes the case for Beauty in two minutes.
"I felt nauseous, impelled to flee."
Any postmodern creator of fine art would be proud to have elicited that reaction. It's what they do.