A HOLIDAY QUEST FOR MITIGATION

In an exchange with readers after my last posting I wrote,

if you go online and look at the 2,284 drawings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you will be stunned by the amount of unmitigated crap in their collection....the ratio of money to talent at the MOMA cathedral is downright asphyxiating.

Some of you scolded me for exaggerating. After all, would such a distinguished museum really purchase "unmitigated crap"? In the spirit of this holiday season, I thought I would post some of the offending artwork to see whether my more open hearted readers can point out the mitigating features I am missing. Here are some of the masterpieces currently enshrined in the collection of MOMA:













As I browsed through dozens of crummy drawings like these, I noticed that whenever I was tempted to give a drawing the benefit of a doubt I ended up deducting points for pretentiousness. For example, MOMA does not appear to own a single Disney drawing, yet it proudly features many lame drawings of Disney subjects by inferior artists:









Why should MOMA display such drawings while it turns up its nose at the Disney originals? Perhaps the answer can be found in a press release issued earlier this year, wherein MOMA praised "a psychological collage made by slicing and reconfiguring the pages of Walt Disney coloring books." The drawings in MOMA's collection are not lowbrow Disney entertainment, buster, they are psychological collages.

MOMA also has many exquisite pieces. But someone at MOMA obviously believes that no matter how poorly a picture is drawn, it can be redeemed by an intellectual purpose. Regrettably, these drawings and their intellectual purpose both strike me as unmitigated crap. However, I am confident that my network of art lovers out there can explain what I am missing.

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