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Before Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazake made some kickass adventure films; Disney owns the rights and they're gradually coming out on DVD. Castle in the Sky (1986), also known as Laputa, is available this month (no more links to amazon since they censored me). This is non-stop excitement and breathtaking art! The designs are straight out of Jules Verne and the scenery is based on Welsh mining country, where Miyazake took his animators for a sketching trip. In the scenes below (top to bottom), (1) a military airship docks at a castle before a fateful journey to the cloud city Laputa, (2) a gang of air pirates rides dragonfly-winged vehicles to rescue Princess Sheeta from the castle, (3) Sheeta awakens a dormant, damaged Laputan robot, and (4) discovers the crystal she's carried since childhood bonds her to it.
Here's an amusing essay by Choire Sicha called The Complicated Art of Chelsea (thanks, Linda), wherein he describes a recent gallery crawl with a non-art-appreciator who turns him from loving the neighborhood to hating it in one afternoon. I made the the rounds the same week, also with a non-fan of much of the art, but I didn't start out enthusiastic so I didn't have as far to fall. Sicha's too kind to mention most of the art he's criticizing by name, but I'm not, so let me say the "rather Harmony Korine-esque mockery of people with Down's syndrome" he mentions is a group of photos by Sharon Lockhart, at Barbara Gladstone, depicting museum preparators installing Duane Hanson sculptures. The people he thought had Downs turn out to be Hanson's slightly waxy but lifelike figures--I knew the sculptures but still had to look closely to make sure they weren't reenactors.
An essay needs to be written about the tendency of artists who hit the big time to suddenly start riffing on art history (think Lichtenstein's and Sean Landers' Picassos, Jim Dine's Greek statues, etc etc). Lockhart's '90s photos of kids kissing or leaning on car hoods were nice but hardly theoretical. Now she seems to be straining to be conceptualist, doing art-world-behind-the-scenes shots a la Louise Lawler and Tina Barney combined with the ever-popular perceptual brain teaser. Duane Hanson is one of those "iffy" artists with just enough critical support to keep him out Madame Tussaud's, but still a crowd pleaser, so in a sense Lockhart is getting a free ride on the fun technical prowess of his sculptures. Anyway, I agree with Sicha that "these photographs [a]ren't good."