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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Okay, so the other day when I went to the AGO and posted about the sculpture and landscape shows, the reason I went was to accompany a visitor who wanted to see the Christo show. At the time I decided not to bother posting my extreme distate for Christo's work, as why give it the attention. But now the "Gates" are going up in Central Park, and so there's a bit of discussion here and here but not there about what a dreadful idea it is.
I say Christo is good for kids: "See, art can be anything you want it to be ... especially if your arrogance supersedes your aesthetic judgement and you don't mind inflicting your massive ugly whims on everybody else."
It is supposedly a good thing that Christo pays for it all himself out of his hard work selling maquettes, etc. But I find it even more frustrating that the guy just moves his ideas forward, without peer review, or, and this may be the only time I say this, market validation. I know he has to go through lots of bureaucratic hoops, and maybe the fact he's able to pull off the required permissions means that he has some cultural credibility, but I'm not convinced. This quote from today's NY Times is chilling:
The [police] department is dispatching helicopters that broadcast live aerial feeds, building a 24-hour command center in the Loeb Boathouse at the park and adding several hundred police officers to the park's 125-person police force. There will be 20 officers on horseback and 43 on scooter patrol. In addition, the artists have hired a 36-person private security team to maintain round-the-clock surveillance. Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, said the artists would reimburse the city for any costs it incurs, including the increased security.As if littering the park with yellow fabric weren't oppressive enough, there's gonna be massive surveillance and police presence protecting the stuff as well. How nice for everyone.
"It seems to me that the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique. [...] The modern artist is living in a mechanical age and we have a mechanical means of representing nature, such as the camera and photograph. The modern artist, it seems to me, is working and expressing an inner world—in other words—expressing the energy, the motion, and other inner forces."
Jackson Pollock in a 1950 interview with William Wright, quoted from Art in Theory, Blackwell Publishers, 1992, p. 575-576)
