The art of knowing when to be outraged

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL? Not if some Americans have anything to say about it. Probably not even America the Vaguely Interesting. And no chance of America the Wow-Get-a-Load-of-That.

Does art really have to be a four-letter word in this country? We don’t put much government money into it -- California has the worst per capita investment of any state, at 9 cents a head, and the nation is the biggest art skinflint in the Western world at a buck-17. We’re especially cranky about art in public view, no matter who pays for it: Now what the heck is that? They could’ve fit in six more parking spaces instead. My kid could do better.

Don’t ever take a vote; public toilets would beat public art. But oh, how we love, absolutely loooove, to fight over it. In that, we certainly get our piddly money’s worth, or whoever’s money is paying for it.

* At Los Angeles International Airport, workers were alarmed by art of giant naked guys etched into the stone floors. One official asked -- I kid you not -- what if some Amish family flies in and sees it? Since then, it’s been mostly covered up by security equipment. Happy now?

* “Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War in Iraq” is a temporary, progressive and unquestionably political memorial -- a pair of boots for every military man and woman who has died in Iraq. In Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Long Beach, Pasadena, Los Angeles and San Francisco, it has generated more sorrow than anger, and a lot of soul searching.

* Fourteen gallons of government-issue brown paint obliterated the Pink Lady of Malibu, painted on the q.t. by a local artist and floating whimsically and briefly above a tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road in 1966. The artist got marriage proposals -- and death threats.

Now a Robert Graham sculpture -- a woman’s mirror-bright torso donated to ornament a bleak traffic circle -- has stirred hostility not in some bourgeois banlieu, but in freewheeling Venice, Graham’s adopted hometown. Since art patron Roy Doumani offered it up, it’s been the talk of Venice.

A local church group stood at the traffic circle and prayed that the statue would not go in. Several complaints to the California Coastal Commission found the work too Vegas-y or Beverly Hills-y, too nubile, “contrary to the life-affirming qualities of Venice,” “like an alien ‘dumped’ on us by a special interest group” and “insensitive to the dignity of women” because of its missing limbs and head. (Anyone who thinks this is pornography must have a better spam-blocker than I do.)

The Coastal Commission staff sensibly pointed out that these complaints were about taste, not coastal impact, and let the statue go through. In unsettling symmetry, the night before that hearing, someone toppled four other Graham sculptures, part of a group known as the Duke Ellington memorial installation, from their pedestals at UCLA. The figures had been bound up in newspaper and tied with plastic wrap. The 47-year-old Compton man who was arrested is not unfamiliar to UCLA police; he reportedly said that he doesn’t like nudes.

Acts of vandalism and acts of censorship vary but perhaps only in degree, not in kind. I talked to Graham, who’s grown a little weary of these cycles of outrage. He heard it about his naked athletes, male and female, welcoming the 1984 Olympics to the Los Angeles Coliseum, about his “pagan” Quetzalcoatl snake sculpture in San Jose, even his fully clothed but perhaps not sufficiently divine Madonna at the new Los Angeles cathedral. At one point in some controversy or another, he found himself wearing a bulletproof vest and hiring bodyguards.

Anything that gets universal approval isn’t going to be anything worth looking at. How do you think we ended up with enough boring equestrian statues to populate a cavalry regiment?

Public art, especially when it has anything to do with sex or politics, gets the public upset. But that’s part of the reason for the art to be there at all. The yelling is as important as the admiration; the reaction to a work of art becomes part of the art itself.

And that’s true whether the controversy comes from an anti-illegal immigration group protesting at a Baldwin Park Metrolink station about supposedly un-American inscriptions like “It was better before they came” on a work called “Danza Indigenas,” or from San Jose Latinos offended by the statue of the man who galloped into town to raise the U.S. flag at the start of the war in which Mexico lost California.

Let there be protests -- but let there be art to protest. Venice can’t be the neighborhood equivalent of whoever toppled the statuary at UCLA. Embrace the torso with characteristic local whimsy. Dress it in Barbie clothes. Or better still, cross-dress it. It’s already art; make it Venice’s art.