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Dave Barry is one of the very best at what he does (and one of the things he does, which not everyone knows about [and of which some here wouldn't approve], is play a pretty mean lead rock guitar with the Rock Bottom Remainders). As a writer and guitarist, I long ago canonized and then deified Barry in my own private secular pantheon.
That many modern art lightbulb "installations" and purgings of bodily fluids and functions are repulsive or, at best, boring (shock jocks' chief offense, in my view), has always been understood by the majority of viewers. (That's why the "People's Choice" honorees are almost always the best pieces in the show.) To set up the extremes of such displays does, though, seem something like creating a shooting range with straw-men targets. Easy shots. Kind of boring in itself, unless brilliantly played for a laugh. I can't imagine one person in 100,000 arguing with anything Barry has, well, uncovered. And I can't imagine even one member of this Forum championing the kinds of "works" he is targeting. So it's a shooting-fish-in-a-barrel proposition.
What I can't figure out is how the curators and art directors and bean counters who patronize such extremes have retained their jobs. Are they the most powerful people in Art, unaccountable and unremovable? At the very least, if an institution that I supported spent funds on cans of an artist's "vision", I'd simply decline to renew my membership, and make sure they knew why. And if tax dollars were involved, I'd get politically active, quick. Isn't that the way to vote on this issue?
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