Art-Historic Palin Resignation Fallout
Sunday July 5, 2009
I try, I really try, to keep my opinionated mouth shut about most current political news on this here Art History blog and concentrate instead on nice, safe historic political analysis such as, "Savonarola was quite the pious jackass from 1494-98 in Florence, what with burning all of those canvases, books and pretty decorative objects." Five-hundred years after the fact who is actively rooting for Savonarola? Nobody, that's who, hence the word "safe."
So when, over the holiday weekend during the aptly-named journalistic period known as a "news dump," Sarah Palin announced she was resigning as Governor of Alaska less than two-thirds of the way through her first term, I paid it no never-mind. Free country and all of that. If someone decides to take a long walk on a Flat Earth, who am I to stop them? It has nothing to do with art history.
Except.
Except ... now it does, apparently. One of those dirty, liberal, pajama-wearing, basement-dwelling, Cheeto-eating bloggers has crossed a HUGE line in the sand with me by equating Sarah Palin with Post-Modernism. This is utterly too much. First of all, Post-Modernism is dead, while Ms. Palin is very much alive. Secondly, if we had to, most probably at gunpoint, pick an art-historic movement, era or school with which to associate Sarah Palin, my money would be on Rococo. You?
P.S. To clarify: I truly, madly, deeply love Cheetos. Baked to a delicate crunch, not deep fried to a crackly crunch.
Image Credit: December 2, 2008: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin answers questions from the media at the meeting of the National Governor's Association. Photo © William Thomas Cain/Getty Images.
I would not place her as Rococo, but with the Loud family documentary in the seventies. Observation causes the subject to fall apart.
I would put her with the anti-history, anti-academic, Futurists.
My apologies to the Italians, but…
Only Rococo? I equate her with Loco-Rococo! (With apologies to all of the Rococo-ians of course.)
Palin is a piece of work all right. Art? No. I would never degrade a work of art by comparing it to Palin no matter how much I disliked the piece.
I vote for the The Pre-Raphaelites.
1. Part of a group established by a bunch of men using traditional values and tastes. Some women were allowed to join. Women with attractive facial features were the subject of most attention.
2. Novelty was their basis of success. Once the novelty wore off, nothing remained. Three years was all they lasted.
3. Based their message on glories of the past, packaged it a new way with bright shiny colors, and rode it as far as the public would take them. Once their identify was revealed and their secrets uncovered, they quietly disappeared.
4. Small inner circle of family and friends defined who they were.
5. Close knit family early on until family squabbles caused their demise.
6. Generations later their ideals returned and popularity rebounded.
7. Lived as mavericks.
8. Adopted a high moral stance which they could not sustain.
9. Wanted to dwell in the past while the rest of their country wanted to move forward.
Rick — now that’s a comment!!
Since I could never find any logic in any of her utterances I’d go with Dada.
Dada! what a great movement…like Seinfeld..’about nothing’. But dada was also genius (that Palin is *not*). I think, after seeing her talk today, that (hallucinatory) Surrealism fits her better, or bogus contemporary ‘art’ done in provocation (50 cc of Paris air , anyone?)…the new emperor clothes…