Where High Gets Low.
“If this were at the Museum of Natural History, I don’t think I’d give it another look.”
“So bourgeois.”
“Ooh, sexy!”
What’s a museum gotta do to display a 20-ton work that consists of one dead cartilaginous fish and oodles of formaldehyde? For one, install a new ventilation system. And while they’re at it, rebuild the floor.
Posted by C-Monster
I received this message from Amazon.com in my Inbox this morning (the links are mine):
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Now I know what to read while I wait for my buds to grow.
Posted by C-Monster
I found this in a swanky beach house I managed to get myself invited to this past weekend. The “great lemon taste” of this chewable fish oil caplet falls somewhere in between day-old tuna and Lemonhead candy. Any kid that isn’t smart enough to spit these out when their parent forces them to take them is too dumb to benefit from it anyway.
Posted by San Suzie
I spent the better part of today sitting on a lawn chair on a piece of sod in the middle of Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. The occasion: Celso had created his own sovereign nation (an art installation complete with a tee pee, a trading post and gambling) on a parking space-sized piece of turf for NYC Park(ing) Day.
The highlights:
For more pics, see my Flickr set.
Posted by C-Monster
New York Mag reports that these pieces by Wes Lang, featured in a show called Mailorder Monsters at Deitch Gallery were deemed inappropriate by Jeffrey Deitch and yanked from the exhibit–after the show’s debut on Sept. 6th. I was at the opening and managed to snap this shot before the pieces came down. (The show was purportedly an exploration of “new trends in fucked-up figuration.”) The original press release for the show explained the purpose of Lang’s work:
Wes Lang’s monsters come from the cultural detritus of a very fucked-up America. He takes images pushed under the cultural carpet and forces them back into view to be countenanced. He often takes on Native American art, black Americana, the Civil War era, or pornography in his exploration of the deleted scenes of American history.
For the record: I’m hardly in love with Lang’s pieces. It’s the kind of look-at-me stuff that begs for controversy. (And frankly, these images are an old trend in fucked-up figuration, not a new one.) But I’ll defend his right to make them. Art doesn’t always need to be comfortable. But I did see something else there that I found disturbing. And it had nothing to do with the art.
Posted by C-Monster
For the past few months, I’ve avoided reading about this story for the same reasons I avoid watching slasher flicks: who needs all the gratuitous violence? But this oh-so-juicy NYT article is a nice round-up on the whole artist-versus-institution controversy and it has the benefit of disgorging one of Büchel’s installation shopping lists:
accouterments for Mass and Baptism; a hospital bed and related medical equipment; eight voting booths; hundreds of old tires; piles of old computers; 1,000 beverage cups from a race track; 1,000 feet of barbed wire; 12 grenades and 35 pounds of bullet casings; eight body bags and 75 white protective suits; four prosthetic legs; decorations and campaign buttons from election rallies; a concession stand, popcorn and popcorn buckets; Christmas lights; and 16 large bags of corn leaves and husks.
I don’t know what the hell he was working on, but I wish Mass MoCA would just give him the dough he needs to finish the project. I’m dying to know what he had planned for those popcorn buckets.
Posted by C-Monster