Arrogant Money and Tasteless Art

Any public art that is so tasteless, such an offense to the eye that it may be dismantled by the city of West Hollywood--the city where men dress up like Little Bo Peep for Halloween, and where you can order a birthday cake shaped like human genitalia--is unquestionably worth a drive to see.

Yes, there it is, rising up at Doheny Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard, 27 feet of steel and fiberglass, garish as an explosion in a neon factory--”The Cuervotivity . . . Visions of Art Monument.”

It is dedicated to “fostering harmony and understanding between races, cultures and lifestyles” and to the struggle against AIDS. But you have to cross two lanes of traffic and walk up really close to read that part, because it is cut into a tile set flush with the ground on the median strip where the monument sits.

What you can read effortlessly, because it is painted on each of the monument’s three sides in letters that are probably legible from SkyCam 10, is the brand name of the tequila whose parent corporation ponied up nearly $400,000 for the piece.

West Hollywood agreed in 1995 to display it for five years. It hasn’t even been two, and the mayor wants it gone. So do others, variously offended by its aesthetic, its blatant commercialism, its putative effect on property values as a Beverly Hills-adjacent objet. (The last public, tasteless object to annoy Beverly Hills was a sheik’s mansion adorned with white marble nudes which the sheikha had painted in accurately human colors, right down to the pubic hair. It was mysteriously torched in 1980. (Some mystery.)

Mr. Bo Peep doesn’t bother me--that’s Halloween. The genital birthday cakes aren’t being flashed at a major intersection. I was peeved that the plaque’s grand quote from Henry David Thoreau is carelessly misspelled: “It is never to late to give up our prejudices.”

Except maybe two: bad art and arrogant money. OK, three: bad spelling.

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Maybe you watched some of those fabled football games--the Nokia Bowl, the Outback Bowl, the Poulan Weedeaters Bowl. You think of them as the Orange or the Sugar or Sun bowls, to the annoyance of corporate sponsors, the steakhouses or garden implement firms that haven’t gotten the message through to you yet that there’s no Sugar, no Orange, without their lettuce.

Advertising has become so obvious. Fine groups, foundations and institutions, need money, so why not do good and do well, signing the big check and making sure everyone knows you did?

The late oilman Armand Hammer was a champ at using money and muscle to get his name carved across L.A.; his range was rivaled only by Chaka, the graffiti tagger.

The tequila company first intended a mural as a centerpiece of a promotion campaign celebrating Mexican culture, but then it became sculpture, and West Hollywood suggested it could be more meaningfully connected to their city, and voila, it was also about AIDS. The monument shows a figure playing saxophone; presumably it could be just as meaningfully connected to Bill Clinton.

Already, we drive home on a freeway whose cleanup is sponsored by some firm or another. West Hollywood agreed to rename this patch of median strip after a bottle of moderately expensive tequila.

What next will be available for “your message here” bidding? PCH, named in summer for Coppertone and in winter for Lou’s Seaside Sandbags? How does the Coca-Cola Watts Towers sound?

I have to believe that the big-name money isn’t flowing into the Disney Concert Hall because the biggest name--Disney--is already on it, and who wants to hand over $10 million just to see his name stuck on a wall in a garden somewhere out back?

Back when, rich guys, modestly fronted by others, could have bronze statues of themselves raised. You can’t put up a statue of a corporation. But you can name a bowl game after it. And what the heck is a Nokia, anyway?

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A tequila company spokesman has hinted that maybe West Hollywood isn’t sophisticated enough--or open-minded enough--for this work by a fine Latino artist.

Shades of “Steel Cloud.” Nine years ago, L.A.’s Cultural Affairs Commission was aflutter over a design for a four-block-long, $33-million metal sculpture “gateway” to be built above the Hollywood Freeway. The public was unimpressed by “Steel Cloud.” One commissioner remarked loftily that few members of the public had the artistic background necessary to appreciate it.

(At the Museum of Contemporary Art last week, I saw, framed on a wall, blank pieces of paper, slightly stippled where the artist had shed his own tears on them. My friends--quite sophisticated, and of more than adequate artistic background--walked out.)

Already, a few cities are hinting that they might like to have “Cuervotivity.” West Hollywood should tell them to read the law of unintended consequences. It’s the fine print, way down below the big letters bearing the company name.