Americans don't much like art. They never have. Art remains a minority interest, despite exponential growth in the size (and number) of museums and the market during the past 50 years.
That popular indifference pretty much explains the wanton destruction last week of one of the best public murals in Los Angeles. Between 1978 and 1987, Kent Twitchell painted a gigantic work on the north side of an older downtown office building at 1031 S. Hill St., near the intersection with Olympic Boulevard. (It's half a dozen or so blocks from Staples Center.) "The Ed Ruscha Monument" was the most important painting by the noted muralist. Now it's gone, painted over without authorization in a flat, putty-brown color, the way one might redecorate an unfashionable den.
The news is like hearing of the unexpected death of a casual friend. I've been bouncing around various stages of grief -- denial, bargaining, depression -- with acceptance nowhere in sight. Currently I'm stuck in anger: The blackguards who did this should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Precisely who ordered the vandalism -- and why -- is not yet known. But Twitchell, who was in the early steps of restoring the weather-worn work with conservator Nathan Zakheim, was not notified of the devastating plan.
Federal and state laws prohibit the intentional ruin of a work of art. The Visual Artists Rights Act was passed by Congress "to prevent any destruction of a work of recognized stature," according to the 1990 bill. The precedent-setting California Art Preservation Act makes it a crime to "intentionally commit, or authorize the intentional commission of, any physical defacement, mutilation, alteration, or destruction of a work of fine art."
Ironically the latter was signed into California law Aug. 1, 1979, not long after Twitchell began his arduous, nine-year odyssey in painting the six-story-tall "Ruscha" mural. It was the first major work he launched after finishing his master's degree at Otis College of Art and Design. (His work was featured this spring in "Otis: Nine Decades of Los Angeles Art," a survey exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery.)
Twitchell's Otis thesis show also took the form of a mural -- "The Holy Trinity With the Virgin," painted on the side of a building on the school's former MacArthur Park campus. That ambitious wall painting established a format that Twitchell has employed many times since, including for the Ruscha image. Brightly illuminated figures, painted in an acute Realist style, are shown frontally, standing before a blank field and cropped at the shins. Iconic Pop art giants, they seem to emerge like a mirage from the surrounding landscape.
