It’s always a source of delight when liberal pieties collide. Which is what happened last week in Laguna Beach, California, when Art had it out with the Environment—and Art lost. What made the contretemps doubly delicious was that the art in question had been promoted as an environmental statement.
The Laguna Art Museum was preparing for its annual “Art & Nature” festival, to consist of various exhibits and activities organized around “the theme of art’s multi-faceted engagement with the natural world.” Each year the festival features one “commissioned outdoor work of art.” This year the work, Seascape, was to be one of those fanciful shticks for which modern art is so well known: Mexican artist Pablo Vargas Lugo proposed sticking a streetlight on a buoy offshore. (Or, to be exact, “a buoy-like Styrofoam lookalike.”)
The work was supposed to be one of a couple of ways the museum would be calling attention to the threat of—wait for it—global warming. The Laguna Beach Environmental Sustainability Committee, for example, helped to craft an “installation” on the city’s Main Beach called Rising Tides. That work, according to museum executive director Malcolm Warner, “seeks to foster public consciousness of rising sea levels due to climate change.”
Seascape was also supposed to raise consciousness: “As a lonesome-looking streetlight out in the ocean,” Warner said, “it’s a deliberately surprising and memorable sight that symbolizes the inundation of our cities and highways with sea-level rise—a beacon showing the way we are headed unless we change course.”
With all that self-congratulatory right-thinking going on, it’s not a surprise that the museum failed to anticipate the full extent to which it might have an environmental problem itself. Warner said the museum got the green light for the floating streetlight from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and the U.S. Coast Guard. Permission was also secured, or so the museum thought, from the California Coastal Commission. If so, it was rescinded. The museum announced, the weekend of the festival, that the streetlight-buoy rig would “not be on view,” because the Coastal Commission had “directed the museum to hold off on installing the piece while some environmental issues and concerns are addressed.”
Too bad: The public will miss out on an opportunity to be poetically apprised of the dangers of sea-level rise. But at least they’ve been taught that one of the climates susceptible to change is the regulatory climate.
