The Fredösphere

Via ArtsJournal (again!) we get this Newsweek column by Gersh Kuntzman.  There's a lot of annoying stuff in this column, along with some deep truths:

We just had an election that turned, in part, on cultural values—and we Blue Staters lost! Now we have a new modern art museum with a $20 admission fee to divide us further. The paper called MoMA "indispensable to our shared cultural legacy," but there’s nothing "shared" about the culture on view inside. If the dominant institution in the Red States is the church, then welcome to MoMA, where the Blue States pray! And what a cathedral to Blue State values it is!

I won't presume to impose on you my opinions about this article, only because I have not decided yet what they are.  But this complaint caught my eye:

Look, museums annoy me. Yes, they present the great works of art, but devoid of historical or social context. I can look at a painting as well as the next man, but the next man always seems to understand it better than I do—and I blame museums. On the wall next to a painting, all you get is a card reading, "Pablo Picasso, “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” 1907, oil on canvas." Oh, oil on canvas! Now it makes sense!

Oh, yeah, I've heard of that painting.  The most influential gobs of paint ever!  In history!  But is it, you know, great?  The test of art's greatness is its ability to transcend its time and place.  Here, I direct you to a memorable essay on this painting by Friedrich von Blowhard (if the 2 Blowhards were a boy band, Friedrich would be the one who's always staring at the floor and frowning):

To sum up, let’s review the burning social and artistic issues my little history of religion in the Third Republic has touched on:
1) The woman question, prostitution and venereal disease
2) Anti-clericalism and the severing of church and state
3) The Catholic cultural/religious revival generally and the specific example of Cezanne, who evolved a painting style that provided a formal treatment suitable for his spiritualized view of nature
4) Africa as a symbolic focus of French national ambition and military anxiety

Friedrich shows how all these cultural issues are given a unified expression in Picasso's painting.  Okay, now I'm getting it -- assuming Friedrich has rightly sorted it out, which is something I'm not qualified to judge.  Even with all this information -- and according to Friedrich, it is information not easily found in standard art textbooks -- the painting still leaves me cold.  It's repulsive, probably intentionally so.  I hate it still, and I'm waiting for someone to give me the reason why my reaction is wrong.  I guess I'm just one catechumen who needs more instruction before he is ready to commune fully at the church of MoMA.