mondrian’s neon fantod

Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico (LOC)

Originally uploaded by The Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress has started posting pictures from their archives to Flickr. That is seriously cool. And in case you missed it, NPR covered it this morning on Morning Edition.

And it’s that coverage that lead to this post. Specifically, I got ragingly ticked when I heard the smarmy woman from Flickr prattle on about how having these photos mixed in with snapshots of the new baby or your drunk friends “breaks down that idea that museums are something special, and authoritative and, you know, important, you know?”

No, I don’t know. Museums are special, authoritative and important. That’s part of their magic.

I’m all the fuck for celebrating the majesty of the “common man.” Let’s come together as a people and a world. Let’s do away with aristocracies and classes and all that shit. Or, to quote Oklahoma:

I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!

But let’s not try to insist that a blurry picture of my fat ass on vacation is the moral, artistic or any equivalent of the fucking Mona Lisa. Or any other stuff that hangs in a museum.

Technology, and the whole web2.0 thing (blogs, flickr, etc.) especially, should never be thought of as a way to bring {newspapers/museums/politics/whatthefuckever} down to the level of the “common man.” Instead, these things should be thought of as a way of elevating the experiences of the “common man” to the level of {significance/art/cultural impact/whatthefuckever} as the things covered by those institutions.

It’s a subtle difference, I admit. But the main point is, humanity should always strive to move upward towards greatness rather than to deny greatness and drag it through the gutter. Egalitarianism should be about raising, not lowering. All men were created equal not by stripping everyone of rights but by ensuring that those rights were applied to everyone, even the “common man.”

In the end, it’s all well and good to speak of “leveling the playing field” – let’s just not insist on making everyone equally ugly when we can focus instead on making everyone beautiful.

I think I might have been less galled if today weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

Mondrian’s Composition (1921)

image gleefully stolen from MoMA

Piet Mondrian, source of part of the name of this site, was a Dutch painter whose works (specifically the later bits) sing to me. Of course, “Mondrian” is also just a really great name and sticks in my head. But still, the artist deserves his due. So here, dear friends, are a couple of links to things Mondrian-y…

• The Artchive’s entry on Mondrian. Includes biographical/critical text from David Sylvester.
• The Artcyclopedia’s entry on Mondrian. Includes a boatload of links to Mondrian works online.
• The Mondrimat – a fabulous flash “game” where you can play Mondrian and make your own fabulous works.
• Mondrian – “An applet to randomly generate modern art in the style of Piet Mondrian.”
• And finally, the obligatory wikipedia entry.

Sometimes Mondrian’s works make my head hurt. But a lot of the time I find them soothing. That’s probably the two halves of my brain at war with one another. See, I tend to come out ~50/50 on online right/left brain tests, so I guess it’s only right that Mondrian intrigues me.

And that is your art history/yongi psychology lesson for the day.

Class dismissed.