COUNTERPUNCH LETTERS : Expand Tuchman’s Old Job

Come on, does Robert F. Maguire III really believe Los Angeles museum-goers are buying his line that having Maurice Tuchman head a 20th-Century Drawings department is recognition of Tuchman’s achievements during 29 years at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (“Job Shifts at County Museum Focus on Future,” June 7)?

Instead, why not expand the position he had as senior curator of 20th-Century art and ask him to work a little harder, given the drastic county budget cuts? I bet he could channel enough of his energy and talent into the acquisition of an affordable, high-quality collection of drawings and still at least occasionally give us such shows as “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985.”

I am a 40-year resident of Los Angeles, have watched LACMA come up in stature in the international art world in the last 25 years and cannot believe that Tuchman is not capable or willing to go that extra mile for the museum.

Surely Maguire doesn’t believe the supporting members of LACMA and serious museum-goers believe his Counterpunch is anything but too little, too late to cover Michael Shapiro’s unfair treatment of one of our museum’s most talented people. What’s really going on at LACMA these days?

K. NIELSEN

San Marino

Ratings Freedom

Sam Frank (“Ratings Board an Affront to First Amendment,” May 31)--who wants to see “honestly explicit sex scenes” up there on those bigger-than-life movie screens and looks upon the Motion Picture Assn. of America appeals board as “this scam, this affront to free enterprise and the First Amendment”--is reminded that, first, when the United States was “enjoying” the freest kind of free enterprise we ever had, our country was under the thumbs of the robber barons. Their collective philosophy was summed up in just four cold, brutal words by William Henry Vanderbilt: “The public be damned!”

As for the First Amendment, it is not and never has been an untouchable icon. Just for openers, you do not yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater; you do not libel your fellow man in print; you do not slander him vocally. As for pornography--the only word that fits what Frank is calling for--I would leave him with the words of Norman Cousins, writing in Saturday Review, Sept. 20, 1975:

“The trouble with this wide-open pornography is not that it corrupts, but that it desensitizes; not that it unleashes the passions, but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is proclaimed, but love is denied. What we have is not liberation, but dehumanization.”

DANIEL A. JENKINS

Pacific Palisades