In the early 1970s, a person could walk right up to Jackson Pollock’s painting “Mural” hanging in the University of Iowa Museum of Art and look at the paint drips up close. I recall my experience with the painting as a young Iowan, wondering how Pollock’s work showed up on my college campus and what he was thinking by creating this canvas? Stuff undergraduates do.

As time went on my interests at the University of Iowa came to be more in the Stanley Collection and Christopher Roy‘s efforts to collect, preserve and interpret African art, than with what Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner had done in that barn in New York. Traveling in Europe, I began to prefer the abstract expressionism of Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky to Pollock, and so it went after quiet beginnings inspecting “Mural” at length in Iowa City.

In retrospect, it all seems a bit esoteric and egg-headed in a state where most of the land is in row crops, we burn more coal per capita for electricity than most other states and when the legislature convenes, the primary interest of legislators like Senator Kent Sorenson (R-37) is to “burn the place down.” Who has time to spend on art history these days?

House Study Bill 84 says, “the state board of regents shall provide for the sale of the Jackson Pollock painting, “Mural,” held by the state university of Iowa….usage of the moneys …shall be limited to providing scholarship assistance to undergraduate students at the university who are residents of the state and majoring in art.” The bill is currently in the house appropriations committee and seems unlikely to make it into law.

The art world reacted clearly to the prospect of selling “Mural” as follows: “Such a sale would violate a fundamental ethical principle of the museum field, one which all accredited museums are bound to respect: that an accessioned work of art may not be treated as a disposable financial asset.”

One can’t help but believe the discussion over Pollock’s “Mural” is nothing more than a stick in the eye to Johnson County’s University of Iowa and the liberal base that is part of a town that consistently produces many Democratic votes. In the end, the discussion seems to be so much ideological hot air, and fills a void created by avoidance of debate on how best to create jobs in the state. How would selling “Mural” add jobs? It wouldn’t even if that is something Iowans want accomplished this session.

The 84th Iowa General Assembly has become an ideological battleground in which anything not specifically outlined in the Iowa constitution is fair game for the new Republican house majority. It has shared the slash and burn approach to budgeting that is spreading across the nation, and disregards long established ethical considerations and plain common sense.

If the results of the 2010 midterms represented the voice of the people, it seems likely, and borne out by personal experience, that many Iowans are getting buyer’s remorse now that the House majority continues to propose and debate these silly bills. Come on folks, we are undergraduates no more. Let’s get to work on making Iowa the best state in the nation and leave managing the regents universities to the state board created for that purpose.

~Paul Deaton is a native Iowan living in rural Johnson County and weekend editor of Blog for Iowa. E-mail Paul Deaton