To prepare myself spiritually for what I'm willing to wager will be the New
Age of Prudery (as manifested lately in the Gore/Lieberman attack on
Hollywood's debasement of the higher values), I drove to the Getty Center,
in west Los Angeles, in search of cultural filth from earlier epochs.
After all, if Gore and Lieberman are going to get serious about moral
cleansing, why stop with "South Park" when the museums are filled with porn
and violence? Sure enough, I was hardly inside the Getty Center's gallery of
classical antiquities before I was confronted by an amphora depicting satyrs
with enormous genitals all set to rape a passel of wood nymphs. I can't
imagine Senator Lieberman approving of that kind of thing, anymore than a
pretty explicit rendition of bestiality on an adjacent vase, with Leda
making halfhearted efforts to repel the swan.
Aside from doing a pre-board for the Age of Prudery, I was excited to get
to the new Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier and now advertised as one
of the glories of American architecture. One certainly couldn't hope for a
more sensational site, perched up above the 405 interstate, with the San
Gabriel Mountains to the north, Babylon/Hollywood away to the east and the
Pacific the other way.
Meier set off in the right direction, with some buildings faced with blocks
of rough surfaced travertine limestone, designed to look like hill
fortresses in Italy or North Africa. But this medieval look is shackled to
banal modern surfaces textures, so you end up with an uninspiring blend of
airport/Hyatt modernism, with the travertine blocks looking like a prison
set left behind by Cecil B. DeMille.
Such strictures notwithstanding, the public spaces are well organized, and
you don't get the feeling, all too familiar in many museums these days, that
their true function are as venues for banquets for the museum's big-time
donors. Robert Irwin's Central Garden is an odd mix of ideas from Burle Marx
(descendant of Karl, noted for his modernist Brazilian garden-scapes) and
Gertrude Jekyll's herbaceous border. I liked Irwin's giant mushroom-like
parasols of iron reinforcing rods, supporting bougainvillea vines. Resting
under one of them, I fell into conversation with two ample black ladies. I
asked them if they were bothered by Bill's morals. They said it had been
embarrassing to explain his conduct to foreign visitors. Besides, said Mary,
who had been happily recounting her solo drive up the coast to Alaska twenty
years ago to visit the pipeline then under construction, if you were going
to have sex, why not have real sex?
I went back into the galleries, all rather dingily lit in the modern
manner. Lieberman would have felt uncomfortable. Here was Jan Steen's
"Bathsheba After the Bath," featuring a slutty girl with big breasts eagerly
preparing for her first interview with King David. Here, too, Theodore
Gericault's "Three Lovers," an unabashed and altogether approving portrayal
of two girls and a fellow in bed, blissfully ignorant of the Gore-Lieberman
menace to their enjoyment only 180 years over the horizon.
Even the 18th century English gallery contained intimations of immoral
conduct, with Peter Lely's hot portrait of Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of
Portsmouth and mistress to Charles XI. Across the room is Gainsborough's
amiable portrait of his friend James Christie, founder of the auction house.
This was one of Getty's earlier purchases, and also one of his best. How
Christie would have laughed at all the fakes palmed off on Getty in the
middle decades of this century.
The impresarios of both the Democratic and Republican National Committees
would do well to visit the Getty Center and study how they stage-managed big
events in the old days. Luca Carlevarijs did a couple of paintings of
Venetian regattas, one of them with the doge marrying the city to the
Adriatic. How nice it would have been to have had Bill landing in a Venetian
barge at Santa Monica Pier, marrying his party to Hollywood by symbolically
tossing into the polluted waters a copy of the Telecommunications Reform Act
of 1996, etched in gold, before repairing to the lovely home of Barbra
Streisand, he dressed as Belshazzar, and she as Vashti, who, you will
recall, declined to attend Ahasuerus' revels, thus paving the way for
Esther, and ultimately for Joe Lieberman.
Getty's credulity is pleasingly visible particularly in the Italian
galleries. The general aroma of duplicity is nicely summed up in the museum'
s solemn caption to Dosso Dossi's portrait of St. George: "Dosso focuses on
the complex psychology of the saint as he emerges from his legendary battle
with the dragon. The saint's furrowed brow, emotive eyes and open mouth
suggest the toll of the fierce fight mixed with dawning sorrowful relief."
In fact, St. George was just the sort of man who would have slept in the
Lincoln Bedroom and contributed handsomely to the Democratic National
Committee, not to mention the campaign treasury of Joe Lieberman. He began
his career as a defense contractor, owning the bacon franchise to the Roman
army. Then he became a tax collector. As Edward Gibbon remarks in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "His trade was mean. He rendered it
infamous." Mired in scandal, he announced he had been reborn, and the church
installed him as bishop of Alexandria, where his peculations were so
burdensome that the populace stoned him to death. The church promptly made
him a saint.
To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other
columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at
www.creators.com.
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