Clarified Clarification (the Damned Mural)

Marcy Sperry is a fantastic writer. Her blog concentrates on the artistic community and the business of being an artist. It's a good read, and she is a thoughtful writer. I am about to criticize something she wrote yesterday. This is not meant as a criticism of her personally.

Yesterday, Marcy wrote wrote this, in part, in a post she titled "Clarification":

I wanted to clarify that when I wrote yesterday that I was tired of hearing about murals and "beautification," I didn't mean to suggest that murals cannot have significant political power and meaning beyond being merely decorative. There is of course a long history of murals as an important public form of social and political commentary. Look at yesterday's post by Lee Bey on a mural's power (also note one of the artists she mentions who did the renovation in 2003). My larger point was that when the topic of art as a revitalizing force in the neighborhood does bother to get brought up into public discussion, it always seems to be only in these nearsighted "art makes pretty" terms. I'm suggesting that we can broaden those terms.

Marcy makes good points, but they miss the mark as to why the mural is controversial. The reference to Lee Bey's fine piece is completely irrelevant to the DevCorp selection process and DevCorp's obligations to Rogers Park's artists and other business people. The point of my objection - shared by others - is not the aesthetic quality of the art. It is the way in which the artists, from outside of Rogers Park, were chosen. As I've said repeatedly, there is no quarrel with the artists. They were offered work and they accepted it. No crime, no foul on their part. However...

The fact that these are NOT local artists IS the point, and demonstrates the hypocrisy of DevCorp and Ald. Moore. This, in turn, is symptomatic of a larger syndrome of grafting their vision onto the neighborhood, public input be damned. When a DevCorp guy insisted to me that these were "local artists," in spite of my being told by one of the artist partners that they are from Bronzeville/Hyde Park, he was lying. Yes, lying.

We could look at each issue that way, I suppose, and say, "Well, that contractor had to shuck out ten grand in contributions to get the permits, but hey, that's the wrong thing to emphasize, let's look at the bigger picture." But in doing that you miss the bigger picture. Every jigsaw puzzle is made up of many pieces. Ignore one and you cannot complete the puzzle.

Marcy Sperry continued:

To clarify even more, I don't want the community to throw this artist under the bus because some do not like the way DevCorp North does their business. That's not his problem. I welcome his art with open arms. To echo another, muralgate, finis! (...uh, I can hope, can't I?).

Nobody is throwing "this artist" under the bus (it's actually two artists; a husband-wife team). Again, this "clarification" misses the entire point of the snubbing of a good portion of the Rogers Park business community: Artists. Which portion of the Rogers Park business community is next?