Marketing Public Art: PC or not PC?:
"This just in from Steven Kaplan.
I recently attended a press conference for Olafur Eliasson’s New York City Waterfalls, which will be realized from July through October 2008 in four East River locations, including the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage and Governors Island. Presented by the Public Art Fund, these monumental, 90 to 120-foot tall free-standing installations of cascading water will be Eliasson’s first major public project in the city, and promise to continue his alchemical reference to natural elements and his abiding interest in the environment as both raw material and metaphor. They will also coincide with exhibitions of his work at MoMA and PS 1.
It’s hard to imagine an artist ‘greener’ than Eliasson. In several previous outdoor interventions, he even dyed a number of rivers that very color — to be sure, with a safe, non-toxic chemical. Still, constant reference to the Waterfalls being ‘carbon neutral’, even from Mayor Bloomberg, made it seem as if this was the major selling point, as important as the work itself. It led a number of us at Artworld Salon to consider the almost compulsory political correctness employed in the marketing of public art.
We are happy the project satisfies the demanding yardstick of public accountability: that it will neither harm the environment, place undue demands on the electrical grid during peak summer months, nor suck fish into its vents. All worthy aims. And not to be curmudgeons or ecological slobs, but if art first needs to satisfy all potential issues of public safety, acceptability and taste, what might eventually be left? A freeze-dried lump of innocuous, biodegradable tofu, available in white, black, brown, yellow and all the varying shades of polyglot New York?
When The Gates came to town, the city was quick to declare that it would cost the taxpayers nothing. Christo and Jean Claude planned to foot the bill entirely with sales of prints and drawings. Now we are assured of no carbon imprint, no ecological bill. Of course we do not advocate despoiling the environment. But at what point will the costs of art be acknowledged and embraced as an intrinsic part of its subtlety, its brinkmanship, its elemental mission to confront all of existence? Not just those aspects deemed politically orthodox or acceptable to the largest number of constituents.
In other words, will the marketing of public art always be the handmaiden of compromise? Any thoughts?"
(Via
Artworld Salon.)
In an institutional context the term 'curated' often implies a clear division between the curator, the artist and the audience. Historically, internet art and online exhibitions have radically altered this traditional dynamic and now, with the widespread emergence of blogs and mass media-sharing platforms, the blurring of these roles is commonplace. Recently, a number of artists have employed the playlist feature, a function through which viewers can curate their own collections of uploaded materials, not as a curatorial platform per se but as discrete works of art. (See, for example, Guthrie Lonergan's Myspace Intro Playlist, 2006). The French weekly Ecrans (a supplement of the Paris newspaper Liberation) has, for the past year, been publishing playlists by a selection of French artists, animators, critics, musicians and game designers. French net artist Agnes de Cayeux uses her playlist to reframe the travails of video blogger justagurl23-a young woman who 'struggles with anxiety/trauma, depression, and the long recovery process from anorexia, self-injury, and more.' Through her selections, de Cayeux actively curates the emotionally fraught life of justagurl123, creating a narrative that is both touching and deeply intrusive. For his playlist, artist and activist Benjamin Gaulon tackles the concepts of 'planned obsolescence' and 'detournement' (a Situationist term that refers to the subversion of dominant media images) in the context of global waste. His selection of Apple's iconic 1984 commercial transforms it from an image of home computing liberation into a condemnation of the company's constant hardware and software upgrades. The most recent playlist , created by Matthieu Clainchard of Bad Beuys Entertainment, focuses on the vibrant genre known as the 'demo', in which a director instructively showcases his or her expertise. Clainchard's selection illuminates talent in such areas as dangerous scooter tricks, sensational dance routines, and elaborate homemade Transformer costumes. The unique approach to each playlist on Ecrans speaks to the potential for traditional art world boundaries to be worried through a simple online tool. - Caitlin Jones
"
W.H.D. Koerner, A Charge to Keep (1916)
![BlogShares - Search](http://blogshares.com/blogs.php?blog=http%3A%2F%2Fmiamiartexchange.typepad.com%2F&user=15955"><img src="http://blogshares.com/images/blogshares.jpg" alt="Listed on BlogShares" width="117" height="23"){kind=link}