I dropped my membership in the Portland Art Museum—one I had maintained since I moved to Portland in the Good Old Days—during the Covid house arrests. The place was locked down and, besides, what was no point in peering at art from behind a state-mandated piece of cloth.
As the masks came off (from all but the hard-core paranoid), I decided to re-up. Art is worth supporting; and I knew that the Regional Arts Council was schlepping taxpayer arts-tax dollars to the racial-political mom-and-pop art outfits and short-changing an institution that seemed to welcome everyone.
One of the benefits of a PAM membership is a slick-paper publication called Portal. In the past, it offered articles about current exhibits and lots of pictures of Portland’s patrician art patrons partying and swapping grins.
Harmless.
And so,I was surprised when PAM sent me their summer edition.
A “protest”—and if you lived through 2020-21 you know how that turned out.
A picture of gullible people herded around by penny-ante radicals of Black Lives Matter agitators—right there on the cover.
Look deep into the mostly white crowd and you’ll see a cavalcade of mass delusion:
“No justice, no peace.”
“Defund the police.”
“Fuck the system.”
“Learn about the Invisibility syndrom.”
“6 level steps with clear rules.”
And there he is in the middle distance, his image carried like a holy relic in an Inquisition procession: the sainted martyr, George Floyd, the drugged felon who resisted arrest (not his first) after trying the pass a counterfeit bill.
The mob didn’t know that—it’s fair to say they weren’t interested in learning any of those facts.
And then the fires began. And it morphed into the sorry spectacle that would finally (along with the tenters) wreck downtown—and the city’s reputation. Mobs.
Celebrated on the cover of a publication that, in the Good Old Days, celebrated art.
The picture was splashed again across page three, just in case the mopes didn’t get the new massage, the new party-line. (Page two’s boilerplate made sure we knew that, “The Portland Art Museum recognizes and honors the indigenous people of the region on whose ancestral lands the museum now stands.” Which prompts the thought: why not give it back?)
And then, turning the page, a message “From the Director,” that person being Brian J. Ferriso, and I recalled that there wasn’t an issue of Portal, pre-breakdown, that didn’t have at least one or two photos of Ferriso, in his kicky avant-garde glasses, lifting a glass of some fine wine in the company of the money-people.
There’s art on the walls and “society” in the halls. It’s one of those civic institutions that helps people climb the slippery slope of local status. One day, you, too, might have your name on a plaque in the entrance or—hit it big—a whole gallery.
The director in charge of this institution, it would seem, is a changed man (or, as some might say, “A person with testicles.”) His note was a manifesto; he had seen the light, like the apostle in a Caravaggio’s “Conversion of Saint Paul.”
He started with a stunning insight from a stunning insight from the museum’s Director of Learning and Partnerships…
…that ultimately the goal of our art museum is to be “of” the city and not just “in”it. Although it seemed a simple idea at first, I came to realize it was a profound concept. Being “of” our community requires museum leaders to be continually reflective, converse with, and responsive to the happenings of our community.”
To say that modern Portland is one big, happy “our community” is borderline insane, assuming he lived through the last two years. Ferriso, now fully-minted as a classic Portland progressive, is really only interested in certain “communities.”
And some “communities” need not apply.
It becomes evident as one turns the slick, slightly sticky pages of Portals. Let’s take a tour:
Page four: “Perspectives.” A “special exhibition” of more than 60 works by BIPOC—and only BIPOC—photographers, recording how…
Portlanders were called to show up for Black lives and dismantle white supremacy.
…which is followed by a statement that one might think of as a weird, avant-garde joke…
Through the growing pains of organizing and sustaining hundreds of direct community action events, the fire in Portland never ceased to burn
The museum notes that they received requests from “community members” to…
…preserve the plywood window coverings painted with memorials to Black folk killed by police.
Why these “coverings” were needed is not discussed.
Page five: A wonderfully-lit pix of an Antifa warrior surrounded by billows of tear gas.
Page six: We finally arrive at art, sorta. An announcement of “Opacity of Performance,” a “dance installation,” that…
“…explores how much the presence of an audience serves to validate a dancer’s self-awareness.”
It takes two paragraphs but we get to the payoff…
For individuals frequently objectified by the dominant culture, cultivating opacity is a means to maintaining a complex selfhood and to resist being identified by a single attribute such as race, disability, gender expression, or sexual orientation.
Page eight: Nope, it might look like a show of “Contemporary Drawings,” but, never fear, “Daydream Nation,” is…
…a metaphor for the social and political forces of partisanship and race relations in the United States.
Page nine: Asian art galleries are reopened and—how’d it happen? The exhibit is actually about, well…art. (Not exactly, since several of the pieces are ceramics, albeit with “superlative celadon glazes,” but there’s always that nagging argument about art vs. craft.)
Page nine: Back on track! “Apex: Sharita Towne and the Black art ecology of Portland.”
Page 12: “Jeffrey Gibson: They come from fire,” which (you guessed it)…
…redresses the exclusion and erasure of indigenous art traditions from the history of Western art as it explores the complexity and fluidity of identity.”
You may (or may not) be interested that buried back on page 19 is a recent acquisition in the European gallery. Seventeenth-century artist Carlo Ceresa’s “Portrait of Barone Ignazio de Pizzis.” The subject’s dress, the museum notes…
…signify that the Barone also wanted to project his wealth and status.
Don’t we all!
I really hate to say this to the progressives at the Art Museum, but isn’t it just a bit awkward to celebrate one of the greatest examples of civic naïveté in the city’s history as the anarchists and assorted psychotics of the radical left have found yet another reason to break Starbuck’s windows in pursuit of a Great Cause?
And show no signs of stopping? Ever.
That the Antifa (a word that will never be printed or uttered by local media) got to run riot, for the umpteenth time on Saturday, didn’t it strike anyone at the Art Museum that the cops we defunded were too busy taking care of other examples of the city’s social disintegration (or so they said) to become targets for the psychopaths in black?
Do the art-progressives realize that there are people who believe—in fact, know—that the city is in steep decline and who might have a different view of those wonderful days of rage that got the ball rolling downhill? That there are people who will never come downtown again? Whose esthetic doesn’t extend to boarded-up window coverings? And who wonder: where’s the acknowledgment of the epidemic of shootings in “the community?”
Do they realize that many people come to an art museum for contemplation of the sublime, of the visionary, of the timeless? That they come to an art museum to celebrate a culture’s legacy, as opposed to “keeping the fire burning?”
Do they realize that some people come to an art museum to meditate, to think? Not about someone’s racial grievances, their angling for advantage, for their easy-entry into an art museum whose treatment of local artists has always been “put it into the rental gallery”? An art museum that embarrasses itself by chasing the latest art manias and fads?
Sorry. It isn’t art that’s on display. It’s agitprop. Designed to fog the mind, amplify hatred, shove some scapegoated group around, lecture, accuse, convict. That celebrates “us” and to hell with “them.”
PAM used to be a place of escape from the quotidian. But that was the Good Old Days.
Really sad.
I am not all that comfortable with the conclusions and endorsements the PAM creatures might arrive at with the image of Caravaggio’s “Conversion of Saint Paul” that you have provided. I mean it seems that we are just a step away from celebrating actual animal husbandry for grammar school children.
Years ago Portland held some garbage art-around-town fest that seemed to be centered in the Park Blocks. As a Park Ranger I was obligated to keep tally of the public urination or discarded needle count or some such. Back then the "creativity" was tilted more towards sexual depravity than political inanity. As best I recall.
What I did tally was that children were drawn to the austere figure of The Great Emancipator. Why? That long mopey son-of-a-bitch has always been my favorite, but then noir is me. Why did the children drift over to group and lick popsicles, draw 4-square and hopscotch in chalk, and climb on to the plinth, and generally loiter at his feet? Warm feelz and fuzzies were everywhere in the competitive bizarreness furnished forth by the active addlepated artist class of Portland.
Well, I can say this, for cowardice, betrayal of tradition, loathing of America and its white citizenry the arts crowd are not in the same league as the Oregon Historical Society.
Fite Waters did a fine job on his Lincoln. About 30 years ago a woman I was seeing had returned to school (PSU) and took a class conducted by an acolyte of Michael Parenti, an influential American political scientist who is a hero to both Castro and Barbara Lee. The woman I was seeing had graduated high school in 1967.
During that semester of her return to school she learned that Lincoln had been a racist. If you really understood what he wrote and thought there really wasn't that much difference between Lincoln and Jeff Davis. Her instruction had a seasoning of Zinn too..
Lincoln's world nearly collapsed with the death of his son. Yet, he drove a hard and uncompromising war that killed, what 600,000 mother's sons? He would not stop that train short of its destination. He was then murdered for his work. The haunted mind and heart caught in that long bodied man's statue is magnetic. Except of course for Portland's artistic, intellectual, and philosophic elite.
History is less subjective than art and facts are objective. Dead men are facts. We've got a responsibility to facts. The Historical Society did not forget its responsibility, it altered its facts. PAM? They'll never know themselves so it is unfair to ask that they know the community
. . . The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I tried to find a link to WaPo or the NYT, CNN or anyone not a rightist website. Well I did find one at Yahoo. Anyhow, they are still at it:
https://nypost.com/2022/06/29/cornell-removes-gettysburg-address-abraham-lincoln-bust-from-library/