Letter: Museum lowers standards with celebration of Elvis Presley

By: Letter to the editor | Opelika Auburn News
Published: October 15, 2009

Museum lowers standards with celebration of Elvis Presley
I am most disappointed in the front-page article of your Oct. 12 Opelika-Auburn News.

First, the celebration of Elvis and his pelvis as somehow being appropriate for our Jule Collins Smith Museum, with its actual involvement of our children in the cheap, glittery Elvis “culture.” The implied elevation of this to the status of “art” is a mockery.

The Jule Collins Smith Museum has the potential to advance arts in central Alabama. Most of its shows and programs over the past six years have done this very well. But that success will be badly tarnished by this Elvis birthday business.

Shall we paint the Jule Collins Smith Museum pink, sprinkle glitter all over the lawn, hang blinking lights in the shrubbery?

And won’t we be proud of our little children learning to wriggle their hips like burlesque dancers? Burlesque has always made money. Sex sells.

But isn’t it a trashy fundraiser?

And in your right-hand column,s we go all the way down to Tampa to find some person who blasts Christopher Columbus as being “very, very mean, very bossy,” to Texas A&M to trash the discovery of America and highlight the spreading of disease, and to Pennsylvania to find Columbus guilty as a thief and sentence him to life in prison. “Heroism and villany are just two sides of the same coin,” says your hero, Armesto.

So Jesus=Hitler=Jonas Salk=Saddam Hussein=Elvis=Beethoven, and it’s all “education.”

Nicholas D. Davis
Auburn