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We often ask if art can change the world.
Its a beauty too, a pastel-colored winter scene painted the week van Gogh arrived from Paris in Arles.
Museum deputy director Nancy Spectors response was respectful, reflective, and simple.
Then Spector offered the White House an alternative.
Everything seems absurd until we die and then it makes sense.
Perhaps more vividly, it demonstrated just how much meaning a new context gives to a particular work.
Heres how: One of arts most effective weapons is its bodily confirmation thatpleasureis an important form of knowledge.
And the small dose of pleasure imparted in Spector and Cattelans gesture is manifold.
Some Trump haters will see the gesture as a simple middle finger and cheer.
The beauty of the gesture is that while sincere, itisboth.
Its reassuring that the Guggenheim is willing to annoy some of its own board members.
In an emergency like the Trump years, little acts of resistance like this count.
Then theres the headier, more metaphysical sides of the paradox.
First, the unexpected, almost shocking, inversion of one of arts foundational acts.
In 1917, Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with a pseudonym and called it art.
Indeed, in 2016 Cattelan calledAmericaone-percent art for the ninety-nine percent.
We must remember that art can often be political when it doesnt seem that way.
And the world changes everything.
At the White House,Americaisnt a better sculpture.
But in this one place, at this one time, its meaning anduse valuemushroom.
One of arts powers is that it is a static thing that can change through time.
ThatsAmericain the White House, even if it will transform back into a pumpkin after Trump is gone.
