==] Night is falling outside the Picasso Museum in Malaga and I´m neverously pacing in the post modern bathroom. Straining to hear footsteps above the steady hum of the neon lights overhead, I glance at my watch again. This whole idea is crazy, but I can´t leave without knowing for sure, and I can´t know for sure until. Footsteps, boots on lineoum. I listen to the squeaky circles and my breath becomes shallow. I wince as the lights are shut off and I´m left alone in the dark. Unable to believe my own luck (I have no problem believing in my stupidity) I step off the comode and inch towards the door. Outside of this WC, and on the second floor of the Picasso Museum, awaits my redemption, or my undoing. Surely that circular red M can´t mean what the legend says. If I´m right, I´ll be a hero. If I´m wrong...¨====]
OK, so that´s my attempt to crib from the Mixed Up Files of Basil E Frankweiler. But, since I haven´t read the book since sixth grade, I probably screwed it up. Of course, there is no REAL secret, just a realization. (but while I´m stealing from Art Suspense Novels, I must note that I´ve see a TON of religious art over the past two months and the dude standing next to Jesus in the last supper portrayals REALLY DOES look like a Chick.)
Anyway, back to the art. The Picasso museum is relatively new and is completely beholden to the whims of Picasso´s children. Its housed in a converted palace (like everything in this country, nothing ¨new¨is ever built, things are just repainted an renamed. this tradition dates back to the crusades when whichever victorious religion that time around would take the other reliogion´s church/mosque, add a new hood ornament to the top, and reopen it with a bright yellow ¨under new management¨banner).
The Picasso Museum tries to serve a few too many purposes. Its got a great collection of Picasso´s personal treasures, the stuff he kept for himself, or that he painted for his children. But it ALSO has a library, a cafe, an archaelogical dig, a movie theatre and an opium den.
Contrast this with the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, which is just wall to wall pictures. With a line that stretches thru two times zones, and taunting pedicabs who shout (in English, no less) ¨No A/C in the Picasso Museum! Go to the Beach! Its not worth the price! Buy some crayons and scribble on a napkin yourself!¨
Now, the Picasso Museum in Malaga hinted at this, but the Barcelona Version of the Picasso Museum drove home this fact for me: Picasso truly was just messing with us for the last 40 plus years of his life.
His early work is achingly perfect: luminous and startling. And then, as time and global wars pass, he just stops caring. All his pals went cubist and he gave it a go, but even that seemed like too much work. Besides, French Villas and mistresses aren´t exactly going to pay for themselves, so he needed VOLUME. And the best way to achieve that was to toss all the painstaking detail and realism out of his pictures.
Even the Picasso Museum itself acknowledges, in its roundabout and pretentious way, what everybody who visits the museum can see for themselves:
¨The aim of all this is to immerse oneself in a world where brazenness, alternated with the most profound ingenuity and where what appears to be bad taste attains the grandiosity and beauty of a new athsetic beyond modernity.¨
(The proceeding was a verbatim quote from the wall placard in the Picasso Museum. Needless to say, I confused the heck out of the security guards. They couldn´t figure out what I was doing, but since I wasn´nt taking a picture, and I wasn´t actually talking on my phone (just typing these lines quickly with my thumbs while snickering) they had to let me be.
So, basically, the Picasso Museum agrees that this late art is terrible, BUT, only if you measure it against OTHER art. If you think of it as being something completely new, which doesn´t have to following rules, than hey, why can´t it also be great?
HERE is my revelation! THIS is what I should have been trying to tell my bosses for YEARS now!
Sure, if you look at this work against any objective standard, or even, that of my peers you could say that.....but, YOU CAN´T DO THAT! Think of each memo/email/project as part of a NEW paradigm. One where ¨accuracy¨and ¨spell check¨are arcane concepts!
(Let´s see how far that argument gets me.)
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