My daughter was in town this weekend. She ran away from her grown-up life – one husband, two children, goldfish, cat and turtle – and for 48 hours, pretended she was single again. Some of her old friends came over; they dressed all in black, put on their twenty-year old Doc Marten’s and went to a rock concert.
She reports that the 1980’s have not completely died in Rochester, there are still plenty of mullets around, and in this, her home town, the 1990’s is still a bit cutting edge.
I think she’s being a tad harsh. Or is that the role of generations - one just recently past idealism of youth and coming into the judgmental middle years and the other, rage, passion, crusading replaced with acceptance, introspection, joy in wabi sabi, the imperfection of the universe?Like bats, my daughter and her friends begin their social circling after dark and so, during Saturday afternoon, I took her with me to the art gallery craft sale; it was nice (yawn) (sigh) (ho-hum) and spontaneously, we wandered into the main gallery to see “Pain of the Flesh" which is NOT y-s-ho-h but startling and vulgar and almost-but-not quite shocking. I liked it - it is NOT a holiday show.
My daughter was wearing her pre-concert-barhopping black garb including this hand painted jacket that she bought when she was in full-blown rebel mode in 1992 and living in Seattle. The museum guards began following her, talking to each other, nearly pointing, and when they saw that I was onto them, one of them said “her coat fits right into this show!”
We left the museum and drove to Main Street and the Scio Street garage to see the newly finished tile mosaic installation commissioned by the City, the work of artist Jill Gussow.
It’s colorful. Represents a ton of hours of work. It’s good… and decorative…and impossible not to like. But what if it was installed behind a kitchen stove or in a shower stall? Does the fact that it’s big, make it good? Does intricacy make it ingenious? Is this the best kind of public art – non-controversial?
I guess I can only ask the questions. I think my daughter’s jacket is repugnant and tasteless and I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing it. But it captures a certain spirit of its time and place. The murals are cheerful, colorful, fun. Do they tell us more about ourselves? Our place? Our time?Is this good public art or is it more lipstick on a pig?
1 comment:
Artlaw, I can safely comment months after the initial post with the impunity that annonymity brings. First, public art must be measured by a different stick than the stuff that hangs in dedicated Art institutions. The high art / low art dicotomy has been sufficiently discredited by now but the measure of truth, beauty humor and more is be nature more elastic on East Maninstreet in MAG the Met. By that stick, as I use it, Jill Gussow's work is a generous gift from her to me and my fellow citizens. I only wish it was in a more viwer friendly spot.
My second point is... uh... scotch beginning to overpower communication skills... uh something about the way we tussle about local art (never good enough?) vs "approved" work brought to us by well paid consultants (read Artwalk 2 BS). I far prefer we citizens try to scale the art making heights rather than have the work shoveled down from to us from the taste makers.
Now back to the scotch
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