is old art still the best art?
And now for something completely different... :)
I recently went to see the modern art section of the MFA in Boston with Peter, a friend and fellow MIT visiting scholar and himself an aspiring media artist producing 'art without quotes', i.e. art in contested public spaces where you never know whether it's meant to be provocative or where the potential provocation comes from.
All the MFA exhibits, including Zhang Huan covering himself with birdseed and posing nude in a giant bird cage (sic!), didn't do much for me, though...
And then I read this story about Picasso's Guernica being covered at the request of Bush Administration officials for a broadcasted press conference, in which Colin Powell made his case for the invasion of Iraq! I'm not sure if all those explicitly provocative artists like Huang, Bruce Naumann & Co. will have such an impact, even 68 years from now. Maybe that has to do with the fact that those artists are more concerned with themselves than with what they criticize? (try to read over the sarcastic undertone...).
Maybe, instead of asking people to put Guernica replicas on public billboards, Unger should ask people to put it on the front pages of their websites. Well, he has my website for a start... ;-)
Cheers,
Stefan
posted by Stevyie at 11:54 PM
2 Comments:
And what a fine website it is, indeed! :-) Looking forward to hanging out with you on the weekend - man, its been a busy week!
Stevyie,
Hey, thanks for posting about the Guernica project. A lot of people have picked this up and run with it, and it's very interesting to me how many different thoughts they have about it.
I agree with you about "explicitly provocative" art... it's so very easy to make work that annoys, angers or threatens people. Sure it's a way to get a lot of coverage, and draw a lot of emotion from the audience. But it's also just too easy: we all learned how to piss people off when we were toddlers. The buttons are *so* easy to find. Finding ways to delight people, or better yet, to make them think without trying to control the outcome... that's more interesting to me. A better challenge, if you will.
Anyway, if I read your post right, you were saying that Powell's action was better shock art than what you saw at the MFA. Wow. What an awesome take on that! (or you meant my project, but I like the other idea better).
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