Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art recently made a curious move to whitewash a mural painted by internationally known street artist BLU. The mural was originally commissioned by MOCA for their upcoming “Art in the Streets” exhibit. The wall faces the Veterans Administration healthcare building on Temple Street in Downtown Los Angeles. Was the series of giant coffins wrapped in dollar bills too politically incorrect? Did the truth hit too close to home? Is an anti-war mural or a presentation of the dollar’s demise too controversial for a contemporary art exhibit seeking a criminal edge or outlaw vibe? Or do central bankers and the military-industrial complex provide more of a criminal vibe and outlaw edge?
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/14978/censoring-the-dollar-collapse/
Censoring the Dollar Collapse and the War Racket
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Will This Wake Up The Anti-War Movement?
After Keith Olbermann personally felt the effect of political censorship he now seems to realize ( http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/72908.html ) how close we are to losing the First Amendment.
What is it that is brewing in the cauldron of the State?
Totalitarianism is the witches brew that is being stirred and tasted and seasoned just right by the covey of the wicked Statists. They see the power of the State – which requires coercion and secrecy – slipping away and so they are losing their subtle usurpation of the Constitution. It is now blatant, with propaganda coming from all of its snake holes – the Justice Department, Homeland Security, certain ambitious members of Congress seeking their overlord’s favor, the President, and also past Presidents who still desperately want to be part of the covey (and even State-funded institutions of art).
My understanding of the Olbermann case is that he violated a rule put in place by his (private) employer; if I’m correct, what does this have to do with censorship? Also, what does your link to LRC have to do with censorship?
Do you not see the relationship between losing the First Amendment and political censorship? There are broad strokes and there are fine strokes that go into painting a portrait.
Will This Wake Up The Anti-War Movement?
Nope. To them, war is only bad when the occupant of the White House has an “R” after his name.
It’s possible the mural was actually an anti-capitalist one, about how money is killing people or something ridiculous like that.
^^ most likely
The interpretation of modern art is in the the subjective eye of the beholder. Have you not learned anything from your leftist indoctrination?
I suppose you’re joking – although I did have to fight “leftist indoctrination” during my period at university studying social science… in which case I have a honest question to ask: why is it that you see the notion of “interpretation as subjective” as a product of leftist indoctrination, but that you’re ok with the notion of “value as subjective” that is characteristic of the Austrian School?
(yes, it’s an honest and serious question from someone who’s just recently started studying the austrians)
Interpretation of art is always subjective. I don’t think that’s a left/right thing.
Exactly. I can be “ok” with both no matter where the lesson of subjective value was learned. The arts is one place where the left places great value on subjectivity unlike many other disciplines in the leftist pantheon.
Art is subjective to only those that view the art and interpret it from their point of view of what they see, however the for the Artist themselves there is ONLY one meaning. Therefore if the artist is conveying A single meaning that he came up with you can try to decipher it by looking at the clues.
A side note: Personally, I don’t know who the artist is and if he has any idea of what money is and the State’s role in printing it. My guess would be that the Artist is just showing lives being cut short in wars for money/profit. (think military industrial complex) We Austrians perhaps see too much in this. We would probably blow this Artist’s mind…if we sat him down and explain what we see in his mural)
As Smedley Butler pointed out, War Is A Racket. The juxtaposition of Federal Reserve Notes and soldiers coffins is very apt indeed.
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The censors are fast these days …
By striking it down, they have only made it stronger.
I know I wouldn’t have seen this work or even heard of the artist had they not decided that it needed to be censored. And while the full-sized mural may no longer be viewable, the image of the work will now be spread far across the world.
So, to those Museum execs who thought this was too controversial for them: thank you for censoring! Your choice to hide this work has only brought it to the awareness of a wider audience!
Welcome to Soviet Amerika. They’ll probably replace it with a big smiling mural of Dear Leader.
外国朋友，来过留下问候。
Your greetings are welcome, friend.
The wall faces the Veterans Administration healthcare building on Temple Street in Downtown Los Angeles.
How incredibly vulgar — obscene, perhaps — to paint such a mural facing a building where aging, ill and maimed war veterans obtain care. Believe if you will that war is nothing but a capitalist tool, but don’t rub the soldiers’ noses in it.
That’s nothing but cruelty and incredibly disrespectful.
War is certainly not a “capitalist tool” — rather it is “the health of the state” and the antithesis of Mises’ ideals of the evenly rotating economy, voluntary endeavor and peaceful community.
As to those veterans seeking health care services from the govt, they at least survived their choice to become hired guns; the coffins sadly remind us of those who were not so lucky.
Ralph,–you need to reread Mises and understand that the ERE has nothing whatever to do with any realistic notion notion of an idealized existence. Rather, it is merely a mental tool positing an existence without any of certain changes in order that the real world (in which those particular changes do, in fact, take place constantly) may be contrasted in order to observe the effects of each specific, introduced change: one might well call it a purely imaginary laboratory setting. It’s not “ideal” in any moral sense whatever nor a model of what behavior (or policy) should be aiming to achieve; it could, indeed, be a “hellish” existence in which most died as the result of brutal torture–as long as each had lived long enough to produce their assigned aliquot of descendants condemned to the same horrific fate.
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