Art and the future

During the orientation week, we new international students were given a choice of outings that we could sign up for.  The university provided transportation, and also paid for tickets if the place/event was not open for free to the public.

I signed up for an evening at The Hollywood Bowl.  I knew nothing about the setting nor the performer.  But, "Hollywood" I was familiar with.  I figured that I could not go wrong with an event that had Hollywood in its name.

It. Was. Goddamn. Awesome!  That was the best decision that I could have made.

I had never before been in an open-air facility with a large crowd for an evening of music.  The fact that it was music that was new to me mattered the least.  My only problem that evening was that I had no idea that Los Angeles cooled down a lot after the sun set on a summer day.  Totally under-prepared for the cool evening, I sat shivering towards the end of the show.

Choosing the Hollywood Bowl meant that I could not go to the other outing that was scheduled for that day--The Getty Museum.

In 1987, there was only one Getty, which is the one at Malibu, overlooking the Pacific.  It was years later that I finally went there, which was, ironically, after having visited the newer, bigger, and a lot more fantastic Getty Center tucked in the rolling hills from where one can get a good view of Los Angeles and the Pacific on the few days when the air is not smoggy brown.

The Getty museums were made possible by J. Paul Getty, who made his millions through oil extraction.  Oil, one of the fossil fuels that has been clearly identified as a cause of climate change, was how The Getty Center came to be.  I suppose this art collection is yet another piece of evidence that Pecunia non olet--money does not stink!

Getty's millions of dollars ought to remind us of Proudhon's bold and political assertion that "property is theft."  Oil, a fossil fuel, is a cause of climate change that is robbing from future generations in order for us to live a life of decadence.  Yes, I wrote "us" because you and I, too, are benefiting from this daylight robbery, even if we self-righteously proclaim that we are doing all the right things unlike "those" people.

As a commie-wannabe teenager that I once was, I completely sympathize with the young people who are so upset with the elders not doing anything about climate change that they have resorted to protesting at famous art galleries by even throwing paint and ketchup on paintings.

Caption at the source:
Gustav Klimt's painting "Tod und Leben" is seen after activists of Last Generation Austria (Letzte Generation Oesterreich) spilled oil on it in Leopold museum in Vienna, Austria, November 15, 2022.

Members of the group Last Generation Austria tweeted they had targeted the 1915 painting “Death and Life” at the Leopold Museum in Vienna to protest their government’s use of fossil energies.

After throwing the liquid on the painting, which wasn’t damaged, one activist was pushed away by a museum guard while another glued his hand to the glass over the painting’s frame.

The group defended the protest, saying in a tweet that they were protesting “oil and gas drilling,” which they called “a death sentence to society.”

I agree with the protesting youth's argument that we value art more than worrying about the destruction of the natural environment all around us.  We would rather spend gazillions on museums that treasure the past even as the future world that young people will inherit will be a dystopia that will be hotter than hell?

Meanwhile, estimates are that human population is now at 8 billion, and at least 2 more billion--perhaps even three--will be added before this century ends.  If 8 billion and more want to live like how we Americans live--and why shouldn't they?--and if we do not deviate from the path that we are on, well, the museums of the world, whose endowments come from stealing from future generations, will face a lot angrier youth who will not stop at mere vandalism.

Here in America, the political class, which is dominated by octogenarians and septuagenarians, has been extremely slow in reacting to climate change and is tone-deaf to the loud screams from the young.  There is only one clear solution: Send all those Medicare-eligible wannabe presidents, Senators and Congressmembers home and elect a new, younger, generation to power.