At the Late-Night Questionable Artwork Café...

... I'm soliciting opinion on the possibly deplorable politics of this image. I think there are a lot of suspicious details here, and we may need to raise an outcry.

Or talk about anything you want. It's a café post.

More on the artwork later. I just thought opining on the political correctness of artwork was the order of the day.

Consider supporting my inquiry into questionable artwork by using The Althouse Amazon Portal.

ADDED: Here's the card (from the wall at the Indianapolis Museum of Art):



What a manipulative card! Eerily... disquieting... detached... separation... loneliness... transience... anonymity... Can't I have my own feelings? Are the older couple really so alienated from each other? Is the older woman not looking at the man? They don't look happy, but to me, they seem engaged.

Perhaps they're in town for a funeral. They've got their coats. They're going somewhere or they just got back. Something's up, something related to the world beyond this weird room. The young woman with the book is engaged with reading. Reading entails connection to another human being, the writer. Perhaps the young woman represents the youth the older couple have lost. Now, the older couple seem poised, tarrying, at the edge of the grave, represented vertically by the doorway to the dark restaurant. They're on the menu, food for worms.

The lobby is the antechamber of death. Outdoors is only a picture on the wall. There's no going back. The green line of life leads in from the left corner. The old lady has plopped into the chair and planted her prim little toes on the line. She looks with anxiety at the man who, one foot on the green line, lamely explains that they've got to keep going. The line turns a sharp corner, into the coffin/desk and the undertaker/desk clerk waits almost invisibly under the half-shown clock where their time is running out.

BUT: What is the argument that there is something politically objectionable here? Does the white man in the business suit dominate? Is he lording it over his wife? She looks intimidated. Is the other woman failing to notice, absorbed in the distracting delusion of her presumably nonfeminist reading material? The man and various phallic objects block progress toward the exits. One doorway (the entrance to a security room?) even has a cage-like door. The mountains (breastlike, signifying the female) are contained within a wooden picture frame. The alarmed woman's path to liberation is obstructed all around. The other woman doesn't even realize she needs to go. The green path mocks the idea of a path to freedom. It's not outdoors, like green grass, but an ugly stripe in the carpeting that ends in a sharp right turn into a dark corner. The older woman's toes extend into the path — a meek request — but the man is saying no. The other woman is far from the path, lost in a pre-printed dream. But this is not politically objectionable because we the viewers see it all and know we don't want to be there. Thus it works as critique and an inspiration to freedom and personal fulfillment. Judgment: Politically correct.