BY DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI NEWS AND COMMENTARY

This is the first of a four-part series on the Berkshire Museum’s proposed sale of artwork. Also a program note: PLANET VALENTI TELEVISION comes back tonight at 6:30 p.m. with all new episodes. PV-TV’s shush kabob tonight skewers trash cans, gymnasiums at city hall, and the museum. Hope you can join us.

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, TUESDAY, SEPT. 26, 2017) — What?

Is the ultimate goal of the effete baboons running Pittsfield to send the bedraggled city into the trash? If so, THE PLANET knows of the perfect receptacles. You can find them on Tyler Street. Look for the ugliest, flimsiest, cheapest Trashcans [capital “T” and bold face in all usage, mate!] imaginable, the ones that the mayor thinks are “hip,” the ones designed and manufactured by Lewis Lent.

That can be the only explanation for a recent series of events that have taken what little quality and class may still be there out of Benigno Numine, resigning it and them to the stocks. There it is now receiving mockery, ridicule, and scorn on an international scale not seen since Peter White last posted a picture of ham and eggs on Facebook.

The latest and most ongoing of the insanity concerns the Berkshire Museum‘s (BM) abhorrent plan to sell 40 pieces from its collection, including its marquee work, “Shuffleton’s Barbershop,” a spectacular 1950 oil painting by Norman Rockwell. The rape of the museum by executive director Van Shields and his board of directors also includes another Rockwell as well as works by Alexander Calder, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Edwin Church, George Inness, Rembrandt Peale, and a couple dozen other heavyweights. ‘Tis a nihilistic act caused by financial panic.

Newspapers, art journals, critics, and anyone whose anybody have roundly condemned the move, one made necessary by a decade of financial mismanagement and ineptitude bordering on criminal. Articles of outrage have appeared in media across the country and throughout the art world, making Pittsfield a laughingstock and the BM into an aesthete’s pariah. The majority of those 10 years have come under the reign of error brought in by yet another ringer, a cracker barrel with a Darren haircut named Van Shields.

Prior to running the BM into the ground, Shields fell flat on his fat wallet trying to push through a similar “New Vision” plan at a museum down in sunny South Carolina. The $60 million boondoggle failed. In the bitter wake, charges of bad management swirled. Shields escaped that clown whirlpool and found refuge in what has to be the only city in America dumb enough to see missed deadlines, conflicts of interest, violation of accounting standards, lawsuits, loose spending, and probes by SC’s attorney general as qualifications for hire, an endorsement so ringing it made Quasimodo deaf.

At the time of the hire, Mary Huth, the president of the BM’s Board of Trustees, wept prose poems over the hire. The cascade included bullshit about “the extensive nationwide search” and, of course, the obligatory “strategic initiatives.” Turns out the rhetorical wetting of panties over the hire of Shields was all Pittsfield-speak for “We don’t know what the f**k we’re doing.”

In trying to explain the museum’s inexplicable move, current BM board president Elizabeth “Buzz” McGraw out-Huthed Huth. THE PLANET shall mercifully spare you the verbiage. Suffice it to say that Buzz’s clueless rationalization for destroying a large chunk of the city’s soul makes urine in the panties appear as golden ambrosia from the gods. Buzz expects the unwashed taxpayers of Pittsfield to drink this bitter cup as she ordains it. Fat chance, sister.

Fact is, Shields, McGraw, the board, and the entire BM staff have just signed their own professional death warrants. After the wave of global scorn subsides over their unjustifiable actions, donors, funds, and support will dry up. They will lose their gig. They’ll go on to cast their poisons elsewhere. Pittsfield, however, will lose its Self, not that these rat-bastids care.

Speaking of which, Pittsfield state rep. Tricia Faraway Boola-baise (D-Country Buffet), in between stuffing her bovine jaws with fried butter helicoptered in from the Big E, defended the BM board (aside: wait ’till you hear the story on THAT one). The Fat One also blasted critics of the rape of Rockwell and company, deploring what she said were ad hominem attacks.

This legislative wide body obviously hadn’t been reading THE PLANET.

Tommorow on THE PLANET: Pt. 2, a closer look at the BM’s finances.

——————————————-

“Not a word was spoken, but many things were said” — Sir Tiberius Fruitjuice.

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

The Usual Disclaimer.