Enormous art projects are so French. You can’t wrap two islands in pink fabric and not sputter on about it in some Eurotrash accent. Despite all the excitement about all those orange gates in Central Park, I’m uninspired. As such, I was extra-amused to see this cartoon from Bernie, the artist behind Alien Love Predator.
Too funny!
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nicola What about… the crackers? There’s been some good spoofs of the Gates, here’s one. http://www.smilinggoat.com/crackers.html
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Maybe it’s now cool to take a contrarian position about this - but I got to see The Gates and they were quite worthy of the excitement generated, even a zillion Flickr postings later. Alien Loves Predator on the other hand… well, a lame conversation is still a lame conversation, no number of Alien & Predator pictures will fix it.
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Mark: Are you kidding? The contrarian positions are the ones I most want to hear. Personally, I think those big art projects are long on style and short on substance, but I’ve never seen one first hand.
As for A vs. P–it’s certainly not hilarious, but I appreciated its topicality (if that’s a word).
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Darren: maybe we are talking at crossed purposes. The “contrarian” comment was in reference to your opinion, not mine. I suppose I am under the impression that most people who saw it, or saw good pictures** of it liked it. That said, I know David Letterman agrees with you so maybe I am the contrarian.
(** check out nachosan’s flickr stream.)
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Matthew I read a comment in the New Yorker today suggesting the wide-open definition of what constitutes Art is an art criticism problem, not an artist’s or an audience’s problem. (I paraphrase.) So much of the talk about The Gates seemed to be of the “yes, but what is it?” variety.
Christo’s works are temporary large-scale installations, and at the basic level you’re going to think that’s either interesting or stupid. I choose interesting, personally. Admittedly I couldn’t get to New York, but while from the photos it doesn’t have the intensity of some of his other works (the afore-mentioned islands being one example), I still think it’s pretty fascinating. And it was funded on private money too, so all you self-righteous “taxpayer’s federation” types can just sit down and shut up.
Yup. I’m all in favour of random and massive acts of pure aesthetic.
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