Went to the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the SF MoMA last week. Sometimes the best part of museums is watching other people watch the art, and explain it to each other. Some choice samples:
It’s an experiment. What if you took a famous contemporary studio artist’s work and plunked it on the streets? Would anyone notice? Would anyone care?
It just goes to show how much people can get sucked into their little worlds of academia (or whatever the art-world equivalent is) and completely lose touch with the reality outside their walls.
Art is usually defined by the intention for it to be a work of art and the context in which you see it. – Amy Cappellazzo, Head of Contemporary Art, Christie’s
Art is about creating images and passing on ideas. If it succeeds in making people think, even for a few seconds, it has done a lot already. – Luc Tuymans, Painter
(I might as well start attributing these quotes if I’m going to collect them.)
What exactly is the art here? Is it the plaque? The YouTube video it is sourced from? The “performance”? Or the comment about how technology has made us obsessed with documenting every moment of our completely unremarkable lives.
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At least the proliferation of small, cheap recording devices does have some redeeming uses.
Next is one of my all-time favorite street art pieces, Pixelator.
And speaking of street art… say what you want about Banksy, his art, his methods, or the obscene amount of money he’s been making; but you’ve got to hand it to someone who can get governmental entities to agree that maybe, just maybe, some vandalistic graffiti might be “legal art”. And not just legal, but worth protecting and repairing? Because once they’ve accepted that even one piece of graffiti could be “art”, it is no longer a black and white issue. It becomes a subjective value judgment. With every new piece, they have to ask themselves, “Is this art?” “Is this one worth keeping, or destroying?”
Yeah, that’s right. YOU CAN’T STOP ART, MOTHERFUCKERS!
The reference is a bit old in internet-time, but an idea this well done deserves to be recognized.
It would seem that Posterchild has escaped from Aperture Science (and managed to smuggle out a Weighted Companion Cube while he was at it). Citizens of Toronto are advised to steer clear of the “porthole”, as side effects known to be caused by contact with the spatial anomaly include nausea, temporary discomfort, ringing in the ears, loss of appetite, inability to use the word “anxious” correctly… and death. Contact with the Weighted Companion Cube, however, is apparently safe, as one source (who preferred to remain anonymous) noted that the Weighted Companion Cube “will [definitely] never threaten to stab you.”
I’ve always been really interested in symbols and logos, so I was happy to discover a compendium of Rock Band Logos (no, not that Rock Band) while searching to see if there were any reports of a d-beat with in the aforealluded to game (there are not, as of yet). Every day David Cotner picks a band (or three) and its logo and gives equal parts origin story (of the logo), band history, and/or design analysis. It’s the perfect intersection of art, music, and design. There’s a lot of diversity there, everything from Naked Aggression to Joy Division to Motörhead including a number of particularly obscure bands. I love the writing style, concise and witty (everything I am not), but my favorite aspect is the use of unconventional links.
Crateman. Melbourne. Milk crates, glue, warehouse. via Wooster
Reading the recent piece on Above in the Chronicle (of all places) made me realize just what a huge crush I have on Street Art. I don’t
photo: me. SF Mission, 2005.know exactly what it was; it’s not like it was particularly good writing. It’s just that there’s something so incredibly romantic about putting yourself at risk of harassment, arrest, fines, or even jail time, just to make the world a more beautiful place. (more…)
I can’t tell you how many times I sit down to write something and then spend 4 hours straight discovering new webcomics and other related artists on the web. So I figure I might as well share what I found.
Cat and Girl (or, at least, Girl) contends that “High Art is by definition what’s on gallery and museum walls.”
She makes an important point, that the context of the creation is just as important as the creation itself. Thus, a sink in someone’s bathroom is just a sink, a utilitarian object. A sink in a museum, with a label, is art. And a sink in a museum bathroom, with an added label, is… guerrilla art?
And one man’s trash is another man’s highly regarded, uh… pile of garbage.
In the hopes of keeping this blog from atrophying, I will put the Great White Whale of political diatribe on hold, and continue on to a topic that is more interesting to me (perhaps we will revisit it later).
One of the big questions in game development is “Can games be considered art?”, from which inevitably follows a number of corollary questions, “Are games all art?”, “How do we make games that are art?”, etc. Of course, to answer this question, we must first know what we are talking about. So the more important question becomes, “What is Art?”
Similar to what bell hooks once said of feminism*, there are as many definitions of “art” as there are artists. Actually… there are probably more than that, since art critics, museum-goers, and “the rest” have their own opinions about what makes art… art.
*She later argued against that mentality, but that is neither here nor there. (or is it…?)
In an effort to consider as many different viewpoints as possible, and suss from them some distillation or amalgamation of criteria for something to be considered “art”, I will post as many different accounts as I come across.
The first one is an intervention piece called “Excuse me, is this art?” (courtesy of Wooster Collective), which involves a group that creates fake attribution tags (title cards? I don’t know the specific phrase for them) and posts them next to ordinary objects in a museum, such as drinking fountains and mirrors, then records people’s responses to them. Enough words, check it out for yourself:
