Culture Vultures Poem by gershon hepner

Culture Vultures



Buffon declared the vulture
to have the lowest instinct, which he called voracity;
humans consider culture
their highest instinct, lowest when it lacks veracity.
Vultures thrive devouring
dead caracasses we find to be offensive when offalic;
humans find empowering
a culture that inspires them with glory of the phallic.
The day after Linda and I went to the kitschy Pageant of the Masters at Laguna Beach Edward Rothstein describes the kitschy art exhibited at the Museum of National Wildlife in Jackson Hole Wyoming (“The Prowess of a Painter in a Hunter’s Paradise, ” NYT, July 14,2008) :
Nearly every car here has Wyoming license plates, but you can tell which are not driven by locals. Like mine, they hurriedly pull to the side of the road or even stop dead center, their drivers gawking as thunderously dumb-looking bison amble alongside. At dusk a moose brings traffic to a standstill by grazing on a shrub. Wildlife seen through a car window may not appear terribly wild, but its presence is one reason that here, where the snow-covered rock faces of the Tetons loom over a flat grazing plain for pronghorn antelope, elk and bison, the National Museum of Wildlife Art was built in 1994. It is meant to seem part of the animals’ habitat, as if carved out of a hillside above a highway, outdoor sculptures keeping company with their models. In 51,000 square feet every painting, drawing and sculpture is of wild animals; one gallery is devoted to buffalo alone. If we are ready to brake in amazement at glimpses of the real, why not join the 80,000 annual visitors to this museum to see how the real is imagined, how vultures, bears and bison have been evoked in paint, ink or bronze? But “wildlife art” is a peculiar genre. Lovers of fruit salad and floral bouquets are not the main audiences for still lifes, yet animal lovers are not only the patrons of this genre but also its creators. The point of wildlife art is its subject, and the uneven quality of some of these works — even by well-known wildlife artists — shows an impulse other than the purely aesthetic at work. Realism is the dominant style, and kitsch is the familiar currency…Yet weaknesses don’t matter much. You come into this museum from the roads or hiking paths (or, in season, perhaps, the hunt) , expecting and desiring something quite different from what might be offered, say, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This doesn’t mean that the museum always falls short of aesthetic expectations. It may embrace too widely, but it can also touch deeply. The explanatory texts and presentation by the curator, Adam Duncan Harris, are informative, the presentation intelligent. The paintings in one gallery gently probe the relationship between humans and animals (thus giving Beard an intriguing context) . Another shows Picasso’s prints for Buffon’s great 18th-century natural history, in which vultures, for example, are described as having “the lowest instincts of greediness and voracity, ” as being “robbers rather than warriors, ” descriptions that inspired Picasso voraciously to thrust with thick inky jabs, his rapacious bird standing on a black offalic mound.

7/14/08

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