My campaign to be named sports editor of Banker & Tradesman has generated about as much enthusiasm and support as Deval Patrick’s campaign for reelection.
I may have to look for other opportunities – perhaps as emergency CEO of an ailing organization in need of my managerial skills, quite aside from my remarkable memory for every batting average on the Red Sox starting lineup.
The regional organization most in need of a Cohen-like slap in the face is the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Much like Andy Warhol in search of a new soup can, the Rose is looking for a new director, to lead it out of the wilderness and find its muse.
Citing financial woes, the Rose folks had planned to sell off some of the treasures, but that created all manner of angst and anger. Donors and board members and those with a special affection for the museum rose up in a rebellion as scary as a Sol LeWitt mural.
The new director must be larger-than-life, creative and entrepreneurial and ready to crank out 1,000 words on the prospects for the New England Patriots. Yes, I am their man, even if they don’t know it yet.
There’s no point in hiring some quiet, reserved Ph.D in art history to run the place. The Rose needs a tiger. The competition for attention in these here art regions is fierce.
You can drive up to the Berkshires and calm yourself with some Normal Rockwell stuff. Or, you can travel up to New Hampshire’s Hood Museum of Art, at Dartmouth, where you can check out the art while setting up a business subsidiary in the state to avoid paying Massachusetts income tax.
You can exhaust yourself in the Boston-Cambridge colossus, wandering through all manner of sophisticated art and sculpture and Red Sox caps.
The Rose will have to bloom, will have to thrive and grow sharp thorns and make a splash, to stand out from the crowd. I am ready.
The Plan
First, we are going to plaster the Rose with Peter Max psychedelic stuff, to entice the area’s horde of college students to come in and dream about being rebellious druggies, instead of future Wall Street drones or newspaper columnists.
Next, the grounds are going to be littered with the weirdest Rauschenberg sculpture we can find – as confusing as Obama’s domestic policy. We’ll bring in the high school kids for essay contests: What in the world is Rauschenberg trying to say with this one?
You see where I’m going with this? The Rose must give up the pretentious struggle to assemble and acquire the best collection of Hudson River/Impressionist, post-Modernist, Irish-influenced/paint-by-numbers classics in the world. The museum must succumb to what British art critic John Carey described in his amusing book, “What Good are the Arts?”
“Modern art,” he wrote, “has become synonymous with money, fashion, celebrity and sensationalism…” Right on, brother! And that’s what the Rose Museum should aspire to.
I want Jackson Pollock drip, drip, dripping all over the Rose, in bright colors that will match the fashionable cocktails that will be consumed during the many, many fundraising pizza parties we will have at the museum.
Do you think the Cohen Reign of Terror will turn off more patrons than it attracts? No, Cohen is a marketing God. He’s done his homework. Ponder this bit of wisdom from an issue of the now-defunct “American Demographics” journal:
“The emergence of professional wrestling as the most popular programming on cable TV could not have occurred without the ringside histrionics attracting large numbers of middle-class suburbanites.”
Bring on the funk. The Rose will have them lined up around the block.
One option that the Rose is exploring is renting out some space for what I suspect would be very, very solemn events. Instead, hang up Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” and challenge the partygoers to strip naked and see how they match up to the babes in the painting. Now, that’s how to party at an art museum.
By the way, I could work similar magic at certain banks I know. Coffee and little cookies in the lobby for the depositors who stagger in? Try vodka and anchovies.
