Upper Class Embraces Modern Art
The investigation of the history of a contemporary art museum is also, by necessity, an abbreviated history of the modern industrial form in Boston. While the iconography of the machine was born in the sooty furnaces the industrial revolution, a historical turning point came when these forms associated with the sordid economics of production evolved into the tasteful art prized by the cultured upper classes; for Boston, this transition was unconsciously celebrated with the ICA’s first Modern Arts Ball. Right after the ICA was founded as the Boston Museum of Modern Art in 1936, the Gala was put on as fundraising effort, and in retrospect it appears as a landmark in the institutionalization of the modern form as one demanding the respect and appreciation of the rich. One Daily Boston Globe article on "Final Gala Plans for [the] Modern Arts Ball" makes this trend abundantly clear, concerning itself less with the actual event than with listing an enormous guest list of people one can assume were extremely influential if the article expects the reader to know them all by their names alone (beginning with “Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Jr”). Throughout the rest of the twentieth century, the close association between the ICA and these American patricians seems to have only grown stronger, or perhaps its relationship with the lower classes weaker. When examining WorldMap data of the Seaport District the unsettling reality is a Caucasian ring of concentrated wealth and comparatively high levels of education around a section in South Boston with a higher density of minorities with widespread poverty and sparse education amongst the populace.
Focusing in on the seaport district specifically, the harbor’s small docks and peninsulas, which used to belong to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or the Railroad Companies according to a 1914 map, appear to be largely available for private ownership seen in a map from a 2008 government report. This move away from a space defined by the control of government and big business has left the Seaport District at the top of this gilded halo of gentrification as a well of undeveloped potential for those who can afford to shape it. However, as there is no inherent aesthetic to wealth or class, what form should this “next great space” take? As it has done since its first Gala in 1936, the ICA welcomes its role as a beacon for an aesthetic paradigm that the massive construction efforts punctuating the environs aim to compliment. On the interior of the ICA entrance, a wall-sized mural in permanent marker, “Seastead,” depicting a hybrid between a cathedral and an aircraft carrier striking off into the sea was created in response to "the ICA's location between the flat expanse of Boston Harbor and the high-rise development that is transforming the Seaport District." The accompanying plaque asks, "What triggered the retreat[?]," positing exile, "rising sea levels," or the search to establish a "new society." While the very act of providing a list of explanations signals the work is not meant adhere to any answer in particular, as a symptom of the anxiousness simmering beneath the ICA and a desire to run away, this work, along with the other pieces of the ICA collection, betray a certain self-destructive bent within the urban palimpsest itself.
