Poetry In Chicago: Scarce, And Totally Dominated By Liberals
By Robert Klein Engler (02/19/03)
For those interested in news about poetry and art in Chicago there is only bad news. Unfortunately, we have very little art in Chicago. Nor do we have much poetry. All we have in Chicago is politics, and a nasty Democratic politics at that. Just like Communist China, all public and most private art and poetry in Chicago is subservient to the concerns of the state. In Chicago the state is small minded, parochial and made up mostly of elected officials who favor a moribund liberalism. Most are Philistines at heart.
It is this moribund liberal ideology that drives the Poetry Center, anchored at the Art Institute of Chicago, to one embarrassment after another. The Art Institute itself has been morally adrift ever since a group of alderman marched in and forcibly removed an unflattering picture of Harold Washington from a gallery wall. Art and poetry has been held hostage there by politics ever since. It is politics that energizes the web pages of E-Poets.net, a politics that seems to despise America under the guise of new media and phony multiculturalism.
It is an elitist politics of postmodernism that prints the soon to be obscenely endowed Poetry Magazine, and a politics of acting out working-class vulgarism that first inspired the Performance Poets and the poetry Slammers at the Green Mill. It is the politics of feminism and socialism that guides the programs at the Guild Complex. Further removed, it is the politics of quotas and geographical balance that motivates the Illinois Arts Council in its awards and grants.
Of course, there are exceptions like the magazine After Hours, but mostly everywhere in Chicago and around the state of Illinois, political preliminaries are put before poetry and art. It is the politics of the Left, the politics of Affirmative Action, the politics of resentment and penis envy, the politics of the emotional vampires of suburbia and the politics of a moribund liberalism that takes the place of goodness, truth and beauty. It is all politics, politics, politics here, and very little art or poetry.
The politics that takes the place of art and poetry in Chicago is usually the politics of a moribund liberalism and is the result of a half century of Democratic Party rule. Liberalism becomes moribund when it ends up becoming what it started out opposing. Affirmative Action is a case in point. In order to combat prejudice and discrimination, liberal politicians now support policies that have the government discriminate and show prejudice. In order to bring about equality, the government must now practice inequality. If you listen closely to moribund liberal rhetoric, you can hear the echo of the Vietnam war when it was argued that, “In order to save the village we had to destroy it.”
Furthermore, moribund liberalism does not know what to do when it comes up against the practical limits of the real world. Does diversity in culture mean we have to condone cannibalism? Does equality of the sexes mean we have to define pregnancy as a disease? Is art and poetry only propaganda for the policies of social change?
In this discussion, it is fair to make a distinction between that art which is supported and funded by the public and that which is private, that is, the art of individuals working in their own solitary ways. It is public art in Chicago that is most political. Nevertheless, the political influence and ideology that guides public art in Chicago bleeds over into the private sector as well. Public art is a wound that bloodies all who get near it. Even though the Art Institute of Chicago is a private entity, it is beholding to the public. The Chicago City Council may take away some of AIC's privileges if it does not toe the line in regard to praising and displaying minority art. And toe the line it does, even at the expense of excellence, good taste and its own integrity.
Big business in Chicago supports this kind of political art as well. If you want to make money in Chicago, you have to play the political game. Furthermore, many corporations have a lot of money invested in the fraud that is contemporary art. They have to hang together to keep the prices high. They can't walk away from bad art, so they stand in the gore and praise the naked emperor's new clothes. In Chicago, some patrons of the arts have blood on their hands, others have blood on their feet.
Last century the social theorist Max Weber argued that art would become a substitute religion for thebourgeoisie. Nowadays, not only is art a substitute religion, but it is also an ideological arm of the moribund liberal state. Once the Protestants argued for justification by faith, now moribund liberals believe in justification by art. Good works are as filthy rags before the lord of patronage. All one has to do is hear the PBS fund raising commercials on the radio using the same techniques as TV evangelists to know that Weber was correct in arguing that art has become a replacement for religion.
The critic Walter Benjamin knew something like this was going to happen to art and poetry, as well. He realized that liberal politics would take up where Weber left off. Before he committed suicide, Benjamin concluded his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” by writing, "This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."
Benjamin did not live to see the aftermath of World War II and the triumph of the liberal state. Nor did he recognize the rise of globalization and the postmodern ideology required to advance the multinational agenda. Nevertheless, if there are better descriptions of why MacArthur grants fund the Guild Complex other than what Benjamin wrote above, I'd like to see it. If there is a better justification for paying a poet hundreds of thousands of dollars as a “high priest” of art at the University of Chicago, I'd like to know about it.
What better way to understand the evangelical mission of Columbia College or the motives behind Poetry in Motion on the CTA busses and trains than by these words of Benjamin? You have to go a long way to convince me that a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, or a National Endowment for the Arts award is anything more than simply a dispensation of grace from the shrine of ART, a shrine that is in the service of moribund liberal politics.
One result of postmodernism's devaluation of values is that there are no longer any generally accepted standards to guide us in recognizing what is the best poetry and art. The old values and standards were really imposed by politics in the first place, the postmoderns argue, so why not recognize the fact that there is nothing other than politics in action now. This being the case, we are thrown back on the old argument of Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic: might makes right and justice is the advantage of the strong.
Postmodernism shows us that if you have the power to impose your politics, than you also have the power to impose your poetry. There cannot be a multiplicity of yelling voices, while at the same time clarity and meaning. A multiplicity of voices is Pandemonium. Under a postmodern ideology, power will have to silence some voices. That power is now a tyranny of minorities, and not the power of truth, goodness and beauty.
Before public poetry events are held in Chicago no one dares to say, “Just invite the best poets.” To begin with, who are the best poets? First, the guest list must be examined by the Party's cultural commissars and then the criterion for "balance and diversity" is imposed. "Is this person from the right area of the state? Is that woman from the right ethnic group? Do we have too many white men? We can't have gays at high school events!" Only after the list is made up following the guidelines of an Affirmative Action political theory, will the poetry happen. Woe to the writers who criticizes this state of affairs. They will be silenced and sent to Indiana to grow cabbages. Mao and the mayor both impose their political ideologies. They will censure what does not fit and press their taste upon the fumbling crowd.
Yet, for many in Chicago, there is a happy convergence between politics and art. Their notoriety, and hope to become a high priest of mediocrity makes up for their lack of talent or craft. If there is a "style" here, it may be the result of this convergence. Just have the right politics, and the grants and commissions come your way. Only those of ideological purity are welcome into the Party's shrine. There, they look upon the face of power and live. Such poets and artists in Chicago count themselves blest because the wheel of political fortune has found them. Little do they think how soon they will be passed by, for if fortune stands still it is no longer fortune.
The vulgar performance poem, the primitive mural, and the fountain of power without grace, are all on display in this city. For the sake of an ideology, there is too much blood and not enough sutures. For the sake of ideology, there is too much waste and not enough rags to mop it up. "Cows on Parade," leaves behind a mess everyone can't help stepping in as they plod to work. Later, at the open mikes and on the gallery walls, the artists of Chicago shout and scribble, "I'll show you my sore, if you show me yours."
Besides being hijacked by politics, public art in Chicago is also provincial art. The sign of a true provincial is the belief that nothing good can happen at home. The provincials believe really important poets and artists are not in Chicago but elsewhere. Artists must be brought to Chicago from New York or California, and increasingly from Mexico and China. Public arts administrators in Chicago think there is no native born Chicagoan who is worthy of their selection. These arts administrators end up creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
They have to look elsewhere because their policies end up discouraging the local in the first place. Furthermore, as long as their primary motive is something other than poetry or art, they will never encourage a great, distinctive poetry or art in Chicago, an art that represents the city as a whole instead of this minority group or that one. Perhaps the powers that be realize this and simply do not care. What they care about is that the Party stays in power and that it is able to clone one leader after another. The present mayor of Chicago knows little about art and less about poetry. He does know that if art and poetry can get him votes, then he is for it. When he continually forsakes the public good for private or party interests, how could he ever imagine a gesture that goes beyond the practical? If art and poetry criticizes the state or if artists and poets present a view different from the phony diversity and multiculturalism that big business needs, then the mayor is against it. It is hard to imagine an official art and poetry in Chicago that is independent of such political pressure.
Because poetry and art in Chicago is political and parochial, it also becomes propaganda for the moribund liberal state. Art as propaganda is nothing new. In his study about the poetry of Agrippa d’Aubigné, Imbrie Buffum writes, "The painting and sculpture of the baroque period are animated by a spirit of propaganda; art is made to serve a religious or moral purpose."
Nowadays, in Chicago, art and poetry are not religious or moral propaganda, but political propaganda. The chief propaganda agency for the city is the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, headed by Commissioner Lois Weisberg. This agency, like its counter part in Communist China, only accepts and promotes art that is in the interest of the state. In Chicago, the state is represented by a moribund liberalism, so the art that the Department of Cultural affairs promotes, is mostly multicultural, diverse and barbaric. Once we understand that the real mission of the Department of Cultural Affairs is a political mission, then we understand why it does not have the farsighted vision to support great art, let alone a Chicago art. The farthest the Department can see ahead is to the next election.
Political art in Chicago is used to get out the vote, and if this means appeasing one minority group artist or another, at the expense of truth, goodness and beauty, so be it. Bad art is a small price to pay for continued power in office. You can buy more power with the counterfeit coin of mediocrity than you can with the tender of excellence. Who cares if what the Department of Cultural Affairs supports will not stand the test of time? Propaganda and art in Chicago is for the moment. Just like the architecture of the modern city, contemporary art is a facade of precast forms suspended over a skeleton of girders. The joints are then sealed with a silicon goo. In time, rain and ice seeps in and cracks the facade. If it lasts ten years without need of repair, we are lucky.
Ironically, the propaganda that is public art and poetry in Chicago is also failed propaganda. It is failed propaganda because the motive is not to communicate a message but to further the self-esteem of the artist. The propaganda of moribund liberalism fails because it is pseudo-therapy, not a collective aspiration. Such art hardly rises to the level of the great poster propaganda seen in the old Soviet state.
Look what happened when the transit authority decided to hang posters drawn by school children in the city's "L" stations. Because the schools are predominantly staffed and attended by minorities, the overwhelming theme of this public CTA art is the expression of minority concerns. A good example of this is a poster now on display at the Roosevelt Road station. The poster measures about 3 feet by 8 feet and hangs by wires from the roof of the south exit where the Green and Orange Lines stop. The poster depicts a group of children in silhouette, outlined in various colors, just the way the police leave a chalk outline of a body at a crime scene. Written on the poster are these words; "A person's character should not be judged based on the color of his skin but on the content." Running down the middle of the poster are the words: "I am black history in the making." The poster is signed by "Christopher." How could this dreadful poster be displayed, at public expense, and be offered as an example for self improvement or collective aspiration? How could Christopher's teachers allow this to pass their critical judgment? The quote, supposedly from Martin Luther King, Jr., is just plain wrong. King never said this. As propaganda, this poster is a failure. The poster says just the opposite of what King intended, yet no manager seems to notice it.
Blindness to the consequence of their policy is the first symptom of moribund liberalism. They let the poster hang in public view as if such an error is tolerable because it furthers a child's self-esteem. Furthermore, the boy's teachers probably didn't know the quote was wrong from the beginning. Just like the drawings suburban parents stick on the fridge, these CTA posters attempt to advance self-esteem at the expense of truth, promote the false goodness of tolerance for the incompetent, and claim that the lack of grace means nothing for a work that ought to aim at beauty.
When The United States was a new nation, before Chicago was imagined, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed how democracy would shape life on this continent. He wrote, "The relations that exist between the social and political condition of a people and the genius of its authors are always numerous, whoever knows the one is never completely ignorant of the other...Taken as a whole, literature in democratic ages can never present, as it does in the periods of aristocracy, an aspect of order, and regularity...The object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than to charm the taste."
Tocqueville saw this desire "to stir the passions" as a natural outgrowth of democracy. Democratic societies favored mediocrity over excellence. Nevertheless, this mediocrity was not to be something furthered by the state as it is today with the advent of Affirmative Action art. Alexis de Tocqueville thought that eventually America would create its own kind of art and literature. This seems not to have happened because the politicalization of art prevents it. Today, the moribund liberal state actually furthers mediocrity because it is in the political interest of the state to do so.
By favoring one minority group after another, the moribund liberal state actually prevents a truly American art and literature from emerging. If what does emerge is critical of the state, it is ignored and excluded. The ideology of liberalism in its moribund form actually produces its opposite. By encouraging Affirmative Action in the arts we actually discourages an excellent American art. It is one thing to have a people tending to mediocrity and it is another more disappointing thing to have a government encouraging mediocrity as well. In Chicago, mediocrity from the bottom up is nothing new. What is new is that now mediocrity has been institutionalized from the top down.
Two further examples, one from poetry and the other from the arena of public art will add more flesh to the bones of my complaint about art and poetry in Chicago. The 2001 Sun-Times poetry contest and the Chicago Riverwalk Gateway competition will show how both public and private art and poetry operate in Chicago. It comes as no surprise, then, that the winners of these contest seems to have gotten their awards not by craft but by political and ideological connection. They all share the same blood type.
The Sun-Times poetry contest evolved out of slam and performance poetry in Chicago. The first place, prize winning poem was by the performance poet Tyehimba Jess. "Black Poets on Death’s Corner," was selected the winner by three judges: Mark Strand, the 1999 Pulitzer Prize winner for poetry and professor at the University of Chicago; Marc Smith, founder of the performance poetry phenomenon, the "slam,'' and Regie Gibson, the man on whose life the film Love Jones was based. Simply put, was this poem a first class poem worthy of such honor or just propaganda for the failed concerns of a moribund liberalism? I ask this question knowing full well that a critic of contests is in a difficult situation: How can he be critical without expressing what sounds like sour grapes? Perhaps if these sour grapes can be transformed into a vintage wine, then words of condemnation will change to expressions of gratitude.
A phone call to the Sun-Times informed me that none of the three judges read all of the more than 5,000 entries. According to John Barron, there was a preliminary screening by various readers. This means that there were more judges than the three judges announced. In fact, the poems were judged before they ever got to the official judges. A poet I know questioned the integrity of the entire judging process. “One judge had no integrity, another judge can't even spell the word, and a third judge forgot what it meant,” she said sarcastically. Based upon the results printed in the Sun-Times, it looks like the final three judges had poor taste and were only qualified to recognize mediocrity, but what about the judges that read the poems before they even got to round two? How many poems did the final judges in fact read, and did they read in common? Answers to these questions are not yet forthcoming.
In a letter to the Chicagopoetry.com web site, Jane Kostowicz wrote, "Does anyone find it a bit suspicious that Tyehimba Jess, the first place $1,000 winner, is best friends with Regie Gibson, one of the judges, and was on The Green Mill slam team, and that Marc Smith one of the other judges hosts at the Green Mill? I mean I think that there were only 3 judges total. It doesn't seem fair. Even I know that Regie and Tyehimba are very close."
From these final results, it looks like the Sun-Times would have been better served if the judges of the contest just threw all the 5,000 entries into a revolving drum and drew at random three poems to be the winners. The questions raised by this contest should be answered if the Sun-Times poetry contest is to continue and if it is to be creditable. Otherwise, it looks like business as usual in the Chicago arts scene. A moribund liberalism uses art to placate the minorities, to garner votes and to stem off social unrest while at the same time proving themselves to be the Philistines everyone suspects them to be. What serious artists and poets that are left in the city may then reassess their careers. If they chose to engage the world, then they may have to put their art in the service of a rival politics, a politics that improved the public art in Chicago.
Just as a counterfeit coin has two sides, so does the counterfeit ideology of art in Chicago. If one side is poetry, then the other side is the visual arts. I used to think that Mary Kloak Wolf, whose South Loop gallery is bulging with material destined for a landfill, was the only Chicago artist whose every piece was irredeemably bad. But now that I have seen Ellen Lanyon's "Riverwalk Gateway," installed at the pedestrian and bicycle passageway under the Lake Shore Drive Bridge, I may have to change my mind. The Riverwalk Gateway project is a series of ceramic murals. The $190,000 commission, the city's most expensive artwork to date, consists of 16 narrative panels and 12 decorative panels installed along parallel walls of the Riverwalk tunnel.
The narrative panels trace the history of the Chicago River from the explorations of Marquette and Joliet, through modern-day river clean up efforts. Faceless bodies row canoes, maps unroll like the lids off sardine cans, too many silhouettes float in space, and giant, green fish jump over toothpick bridges. Often the draftsmanship of these murals is weak, the colors thin and the composition high-schoolish. "Public art is hard to do well, and I think Ellen has done a magnificent job with this one," said Daniel Schulman, associate curator in the department of modern and contemporary art at the Art Institute of Chicago. "She knows the city's history and worked from her complete expressive arsenal. I think this could be the most successful public art project in Chicago so far," Schulman added. When the moribund liberal state needs a spokesperson to spin its failures it can always find one at the AIC.
A past article in the Chicago Reader highlights all the rigmarole over this project. A man is now suing the city because he allegedly suffered a breach of contract. He supposedly claims sources from the art agency helping sponsor the project said that they needed to have a woman artist, and that there was enough work by men displayed around the city. Such accusations mean that the specter of Affirmative Action haunts the Riverwalk Gateway.
The controversy is now about ideology and Affirmative Action and not art. I wonder how many of those new faces on the committees that make decisions about public art in Chicago actually know of Lorado Taft and his ideas? Born in 1860 in Elmwood, Illinois, Taft’s values about public art are still important today. Is the aim of public art to lift up the spirit of all those who view it, and to affirm American ideals, or is it to give those who are from this in-group or that out-group a chance to be seen, even if they make up by group membership what they lack in talent? For Chicago arts administrators, the answer to this question is political and not uplifting.
You may see what a failure Lanyon's work is when you compare it to The Fountain of the Great Lakes by Lorado Taft. We do well to look at and read Taft again, and then seriously consider his work before we spend more tax money on Affirmative Action public art projects. Timothy J. Gravy's book, Public Sculpture: Lorado Taft and the Beautification of Chicago, (University of Illinois Press) tells the story better than I can. For now, just spend an afternoon walking around the city and looking at both the Riverwalk Gateway and The Fountain of the Great Lakes. See if you don't agree with Taft that the Riverwalk Gateway is another "nondescript pile of masonry." Take a walk in late November, when a few trees in the park hold on to their bitter confetti of burgundy and gold. Clouds hang over the lake like a bruise against the prairie sky.
Now, the New World no longer seems new. As you walk through the tunnel of patronage, the old demons return. What looks like thugs, huddle by fires in oil drums to keep warm. All around, drab cotton citizens, their eyes and ears numb, march off to work. Hungry, they would rather have a turnip than a turn of phrase. In a short time, moribund liberalism will begin to eat its children.
The unfortunate results of political art and poetry in Chicago is that the hardworking people of this city deserve better. They deserve the same grace the rich can afford on their suburban estates and not propaganda masquerading as social justice. The Hollywood elite and liberal rich who support policies of Affirmative Action and debased taste do so because they realize such policies come riding into town on the backs of the working class, and not on their secure fortunes. Those politicians who hold power because of their Affirmative Action policies think that by giving space to the mediocre they can stay in power. They do this at the expense of the workers whose taxes they squander on a public art that is not worthy of a free people. No one would tolerate this attitude about performance in a professional sports arena, why should we have to see it under Lake Shore Drive or in the pages of the Sun-Times?
In his recent book, My Love Affair With America, (The Free Press) Norman Podhoretz considers the accomplishments of the world's great civilizations such as czarist Russia and Periclean Athens. He writes, "I believe with all my heart that the United States of America belongs on that list. (Yet) We have not earned a place on it, as the others mainly did, by our contributions to the arts. In this respect, we have not fulfilled the dreams of John Adams." This observation could simply be the grumbling of a New York intellectual who looks down his nose at Chicago, and the even lesser art made here, but I believe it is more than that.
Podhoretz may be correct about American art in general, and the proof he needs is right here in Chicago. The fact that a work like Ellen Lanyon's Riverwalk Gateway could be selected and installed is proof the moribund liberal political machine that runs the city is bringing mediocrity to us under the new name of "Affirmative Action" and in the new packaging of "Diversity." Where will it end? Certainly not with the public improved. It is enough now to recall the words of Boethius, "... inasmuch as you are ignorant of the end of all things, you imagine that worthless and wicked men are powerful and happy."
Yet it is not only in Chicago that the concerns of contemporary art and poetry conflict with the lives of ordinary people. It is the nature of our time that many educated men and women accept a multiplicty of meaning in their personl life while at the same time sensing that history is heading towards the fulfillment of a single meaning. Consider the interview with Reetika Vaziravi in the January, 2003 issue of Poets and Writers. While discussing her development as a poet, she comments on her study at the University of Virginia with former poet laureate Rita Dove. “I was very lucky, first to have a women of color,” Vaziravi says. One can imagine many readers of this interview nodding in agreement. It is a moribund liberal axiom that only “a woman of color” can teach something to another woman of color. What poet these days could get away with saying, “I learned to write sonnets by going to the library and studying Shakespeare. I was very lucky to find a book by a white man?” How odd that those who preach inclusiveness are often the most exclusive.
For many ordinary working people in Chicago contemporary poetry and art is a great mystery. They feel compelled to like art and poetry, but they certainly don’t understand it. More often than not, they then feel guilty and dismayed. In the end, they just ignore the poetry and art around them. They leave it up to the specialists, the arts administrators and educators that now control most public art and poetry. If only there were a way to understand the poetry and art of Chicago, if only there were a theory to explain all the particulars seen and heard in the public realm, then many ordinary Chicagoans would perhaps take more interest in the work selected by the city’s art experts.
I propose there is such a theory advanced by this essay, and it goes a long way in explaining the poetry and art in Chicago. Simply put, most public art and poetry in Chicago is propaganda for the moribund liberal state. In Chicago, most public and much private art is for the sake of votes and Affirmative Action, hardly ever art for art’s sake. If an ordinary Chicagoan goes to a gallery or a poetry reading with this theory in mind, then most of what he hears or sees will be understandable.
Furthermore, most ordinary Chicagoans will conclude that what they do see and hear is not only propaganda, but dreadful propaganda at that. The public galleries and poetry readings further a wish for equality at the expense of talent. Now, it is clear. The mystery of art and poetry is really the slight of hand we know as Chicago politics, the same slight of hand that allows dead men to vote. The bad becomes the good for the sake of power. Chicago makes its good artists suffer and its bad artists prosper.
Yet there is an uneasiness in the city. The art and poetry moribund liberals thought would save them, along with their political ideology, have reached a practical limit. Moribund liberals have come to the edge of the New World and are afraid of falling off the deep end. They cannot bare to know events have pricked the balloon of their ideology, while at the same time ordinary people no longer come to the shrines of art to worship and offer alms. See how the true believers hurry from one emptiness to another. They still hope that this gallery or that declamation will tell them again what they were taught to believe. Baring that, they hurry from one willful appointment to the next. That woman wearing Birkenstock sandals wants to get her childbirth out of the way quickly so she can climb a mountain. This man driving a BMW needs more illegal aliens to staff his landscaping business. That professor is impatient. He insults his students because the boys dream of being firemen. Like a patient delirious and near the end, the art of a moribund liberalism cries out one disconnected avowal after another.
No one attending the deathwatch dare admit that their purges will sweep away America along with the patient. The nation will pass in the wind like the dry leaves of November. In its place, a hodgepodge of do-rags, fu-dogs, and taco stands tend the mongrel souls of the new Chicago. Born from resentment and the policies of a moribund liberalism, the barbarians wait to inherit the city. Then they will decorate it with their dayglow cartoons. Perhaps they will appear tomorrow in the street wearing the gray uniform of postmodernism.
From a historical perspective, we should not be surprised that liberalism has reached a moribund phase and that its poetry and art reflects that decay. Unless we are exceptionally vigilant, this downward slide happens to all human efforts, even the effort to improve the world. The motives that inspired the old Soviet Union wore out, so the same happens to liberalism in the West. Today, the failure of our attempt to impose a form of idealism on reality grows ever more evident. By now, these ideals are as old as the French Revolution and have reached practical limits. Our ideals descended from the heights and hoped to transform the mud of reality into a finer light. No matter if the mud of the world did not want nor even deserve equality, liberty and fraternity, liberalism imposes its vision regardless.
Affirmative Action in poetry and the arts is just one child of this worn out liberal love affair. Misbegotten and misshapen, our art and poetry stumbles along at the expense of talent. Dispersed throughout the nation with one life ruined here and another there, the evils of Affirmative Action are just as much a horror as the Reign of Terror was when it focused on a single guillotine set up in a Parisian Plaza. The point of the American Revolution was to create a place where talent could rise from the bottom up, not to have a favorite anointed with talent by Affirmative Action from the top down. When liberalism becomes moribund it forces its ideal on reality regardless of reality’s shape or reason. Then those who seek power become a royalty our revolution initially opposed. To secure its place, the new royalty created by moribund liberalism ends up politicizing art.
When art and poetry are politicized we create an opening where the relative values of postmodernism dominate. This is the final irony of the Sun-Times poetry contest and the Riverwalk Gateway. The standards that these contests supposed, sink into the muck of politics and posturing. Even the Pulitzer Prize and the bucolic Illinois poets who win it succumbs to the corrosion of relativism. We end up praising the pathetic, for at the very least, everyone can be pathetic.
When the politics of moribund liberalism dominates the arts, the public not only gets silly poems, but ugly murals under the Lake Shore Drive bridge. At this rate, Chicago will need a separate land fill just to hold all this mediocrity, along with the garbage churned out by its student Gallery 37. That is why when it comes to art in Chicago the news is only bad news. Someday, perhaps in a more sensible but barren future, one yet born, may stir the embers and find that a few scraps of poetry and art remain in the ashes of what used to be Chicago.
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