Before we started our Napa/Coastal Drive trip, J and I had an afternoon in LA. Mind you I was up at 5:30 am for a 9 am flight and didn’t sleep on the flight so I was a tad cranky. Anyway, he took me to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) to see the much touted “Levitated Mass” exhibit.

This is it. A rock, a ginormous rock, bolted over a sidewalk and supported by cement walls. This is one of those occasions where the artist clearly did not have a Webster dictionary on hand. Or they were too arrogant to look the word up. Levitate means “to rise or float in or as if in the air especially in seeming defiance of gravitation.”

An emperor-has-no-clothes sort of art installation. If you tell me mass is levitated, I expect that’s what it will be. Resting on cement walls and bolted in is in no way a defiance of gravity. This installation cost $20 million dollars. And according to the articles, the big draw is how often do you get to look at the bottom of a statue? Um not often, but I can go in my yard and pick up a rock and look at the bottom of it anytime.

In a time where schools are cutting art programs and libraries are being closed because of scarcity of funds, this is an abomination in excess.

We walked onward to the La Brea Tar Pits. This is what it looks like when they are working around the pit.

These pits are enclosed by huge fences (you can see it on the edge of the picture below) because people have a propensity to litter into the tar. It smelled sulphuricious and in some spots bubbled.

Urban Lights was an interesting sight. I think of it as lamposts at full attention at LACMA.

About these ads