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John Waters: Indecent Exposure at
Baltimore Museum of Art

In October 2018,  the Baltimore Museum opened an exhibit John Waters: Indecent Exposure, the first major retrospective of the artist’s visual art in his hometown of Baltimore featuring 160 works that span 30 years.
The same month, the art world news repeated many stories of the Banksy painting “Girl with Balloon” that went for $1.4 million and then went up in self-destruction.  
What Water’s exhibit has is a painting that does something else.  You stand too close to the picture of the flower on the wall to see it better  and it squirts water in your face.   Titled appropriately “Hardy Har.” 
Rather than groaning at the story of a painting that seems like a waste of money the moment it is sold, Waters’ watery flower keeps giving people something to laugh at.
This is a show that is playful with objects that re-cast our sacred icons and symbols, one that will make people laugh, squirm, grimace— at the discovery of the irreverent, indecents and just well plain awful taste that is —well -what we buy into all day as culture.
The humor is not just the subject matter or the words or the paint or the paper but that Waters uses the same media format itself.  His Library Series  have taken book covers like God’s Little Acre,  and renamed it, perhaps more accurately, as  God’s Little Faker. That a book should be so pretentious when a mere letter change makes it absolutely ridiculous is hilarious.
Waters is maybe best known for his made in Baltimore movies,  which are featured in this collection.   Much of his art pokes at Hollywood movies. 
If art becomes meaningful when we can bring to it some of our life experience,  there is hardly anything in this exhibit that no one has not seen already many times.  This stuff blasts at us everywhere, in the ads and the objects and the formats so pretentious as those books.  
This is not  satire but something much more human, something that is outrageous in our ordinary stuff.    
Nor does one does not leave the exhibit impressed with the artist’s genius— but rather with a good chuckle to return to the outer world where there are so many objects and icons awaiting us,  our eyes now wider opened by the wonder that is John Waters’ art.

WANT TO KNOW MORE
John Waters: Indecent Exposure at The Baltimore Museum of Art, until

 Jan. 2019.

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