Blu Whitewash

True Art long since moved out of the confines of the gallery, creating a schism between art that is truely contemporary, and the sanitized approximation of modern art, that the world of big gallery acceptance would have us believe is modern.

Cosying up to rebellion and controversy can lead to much cachet. It can also backfire, as street art champion Jeffery Deitch director of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art found this week, when he was forced to whitewash out a mural by Italian graffiti artist Blu.

The giant mural featured rows of coffins with dollar bills attached to the lids. A yawn-some anti war protest that might not go down to well with MOCA’s big money sponsors and moneyed fine art clientele? A decision that I leave to the conscience of individual Juicelings.

But big Jeff didn’t take any chances, and the offending work was painted over quicker than an unsavory epithet scrawled with a sharpie on one of MOCA’s restroom walls.

According to Marcel Duchamp, ‘All art must shock and provoke thought.’ fine words from the creator of the signed latrine and the godfather of the prototypicaly rebelious Dada movement. A sentiment that certainly applies to the work by Blu. But do we really want to be shocked and provoked all the time? Do we care about political cliche writ large on the gallery wall?

The real statement here is of course the disrespect and the metaphorical wedgie that Blu has pulled on MOCA and Deitch, who has only made things worse for himself by claiming the mural might upset Japanese American veterans and that Blu can return to paint another (presumably less controversial) mural if he likes. Oh dear, it would seem big Jeff and MOCA’s David Geffen wing aren’t quite as hip as they thought they were after all.