In Politics, Kamala Harris Is the Skill-Bereft Bohemian Artist

Kamala Harris Is Modern Art

One morning 20 plus years ago, I visited the Frick Museum in New York. I’m not one of these touchy-feely types that get all wispy and teary eyed over a beautiful sunset, but I was positively moved by the Renaissance art I saw that day. It was substantive, spiritual, skillfully created and timeless, representing the aggregation of a multitude of momentous events, western enlightenment and human experiences.   Gravitas, but wrapped in a package of benign grace. It was as though some sort of divine light was emanating through the faces of each subject, clearly expressing an important message. No one had to tell me what each painting was about.   That afternoon, I decided to take in some modern art, and strolled over to the Whitney where one of the celebrated exhibitions was a big pile of dirt on the floor. I’m sure the sign on the wall explained why the dirt was art and not just a big pile of dirt, and I’m also sure that many “identified” due to their self-perceived elevated status. 

A few years ago, Marvin Bush, son of George H. W. Bush sent me a piece of art that had been on his father’s desk in the Oval Office. He knew I liked the artist, and his gift was the kind of kindness and thoughtfulness for which his family is so well known. The artist, Howard Finster was just a good ole boy from North Georgia. I like his work because he did not go to Parsons or the Sorbonne to be told what is art.  His work was totally organic, and an expression of his true beliefs, and not what he thought others wanted to see. Oh, if our politicians and their cult followers could do the same!

A couple weeks ago I wrote an article about how liberal white women are insane for supporting Kamala Harris for president. My thesis and I know I am dead on, is emotion and the need to assuage insecurities by being part of a perceived fashionable crowd drive these women to ignore substance in favor of complete insanity. To be fair, many men are this way as well. Upon completion of the article, the parallel to modern art enthusiasts seemed inescapable.

I had never read Tom Wolfe’s the Painted Word until a few days ago. I had always wanted to read it because I felt as though my thoughts on “herd mentality” might mirror Wolfe’s observations of the mid-70s modern art scene in Manhattan. After all, human nature never changes.  I’m an Aristotelian logic kind of guy. It befuddles me, indeed depresses me how so many can be devoid of objective reality, and the negative consequences this lack of reason has on a well-functioning society.  I was also hoping that Wolfe’s eloquence would provide me with a well-turned passage to use in this article. He did not disappoint:

“Today there is a peculiarly modern reward that the avant-guard artist can give his benefactor; namely, the feeling that he, like his mate the artist, is  separate from and aloof from the bourgeoisie, the middle classes…the feeling that he may be from the middle classes but he is no longer in it….the feeling that he is a fellow soldier, or at least an aide-de-camp or an honorary cong guerrilla in the vanguard march through the land of the philistines. This is a peculiarly modern need and peculiarly modern kind of salvation (from the sin of Too Much Money) and something quite common among the well-to-do all over the West, in Rome and Milan as well as New York. That is why collecting contemporary art, the leading edge, the latest things, warm and wet from the Loft, appeals specifically to those who feel most uneasy about their own commercial wealth….See? I’m not like them–those Jaycees, those United Fund chairmen, those Young Presidents, those mindless New York A.C. goyisheh hog-jowled stripe-tied goddamn-good-to-see-you-you-old bastard–you oyster-bar trenchermen… Avant-garde art, more than any other, takes the Mammon and the Moloch out of money, puts Levi’s, turtlenecks, muttonchops, and other mantles and laurels of bohemian grace upon it.

That is why collectors today not only seek out the company of, but also want to hang out amidst, lollygag around with, and enter into the milieu of…the artists they patronize. They want to climb those vertiginous loft building stairs on Howard Street that go up five flights without a single turn or bend—straight up! like something out of a casebook dream—to wind up with their hearts ricocheting around in the rib cages with tachycardia from the exertion mainly but also from the anticipation that just beyond this door at the top….in this loft…lie the real goods…paintings, sculptures that are indisputably part of the new movement, the new ecolé, the new wave…something unshrinkable, chipsy, pure cong, bourgeois-proof.”

It’s 1975 NYC lingo, but you get Wolfe’s drift. The culturati cannot be associated with the bourgeoisie! You see in politics, Kamala Harris is the bohemian artist, splattering paint on canvas with no real skill, much less substantive knowledge of the world around her. Her insane supporters are much like the Upper East side benefactors of her modern art. The artist understands that her benefactors are attracted to fads and thus produces work that elevates the artist in the eyes of the benefactors, the culturati.

As far as Trump v. Harris is concerned, the culturati cannot be associated with Trump supporters, not because of who and what they are, but because of how they perceive them to be, the unwashed bourgeoise! Why who wants to be associated with HVAC technicians, truck drivers and people who have never eaten at Cipriani’s! My god, these people attend church softball games and have garages with peg boards on the wall full of tools! Kamala throws her fads against the canvas and the culturati eat it up, not because these fashionable notions have any intellectual heft, believing in them separates the culturati from the insurance salesman, the electrical contractor and the civil engineer who went to a “cow college.” Thus, to separate themselves from these horrid people, the culturati and the culturati wannabes put silly platitudinal signs in their yards that say such things “Stop Climate Change Now!,” “No Human Being Is Illegal” and “Black Lives Matter.”

Just like the Bohemian loft dweller knows nothing of Bellini, Raphael or Van Eyck, the times in which they lived and what inspired their art, Kamala the political artist and her benefactors know nothing but faddish cliches. It’s ok if public school teachers convince little boys to become little girls and have their penises cut off without their parents’ permission. Not only is this the new hip fashion, but most importantly it is a practice that the banal and boorish bourgeoisie vehemently reject.  The culturati will believe any absurdity. If fashionable, they will genuflect in front of a Mark Rothko blank canvas, perhaps even weep, but not be able to express one amp of cognitive currency to explain what if any virtue the painting has.  Kamala Harris is the Mark Rothko painting.

Kamala did not get one primary vote. She’s being installed into office by an invisible cabal of nefarious forces hell bent on putting the Cloward-Piven strategy into action. She’s a cultural Marxist who advocates not just a 70% tax rate, but redistributing property from those that have achieved to those who haven’t. She advocates a regulatory policy that practically puts all industry under the control of the government. She’s for shutting down the First Amendment, giving government the power to determine what is acceptable speech. She has said she wants to confiscate guns from the law abiding.  Think police state, gulag and starvation.

Mark Rothko must be celebrated among the pantheon of gods for his great virtue and marvelous work, and so must Kamala say the empty tomb of the culturati’s cranium. Why, asks the farmer? “Oh shut up you boorish hick!”  But why, asks the hardware store owner? “It just must be done!” Give me a reason asks the restaurant owner. “You wouldn’t understand,” she says as she lifts the crystal stemware to her lips and sips the hemlock, completely unaware that she is not only poisoning herself, but everything  she values.

Being hip has its consequences.

This article was originally published by RealClearMarkets and made available via RealClearWire.