Somehow tenuously connected to the Super Bowl in our Super City comes a Super Art Exhibit, cryptically yclept "TURF", in the old city hall building.
I'm watching the reporter describe it, and he's wandering through a bare room that, as Warhol is my witness, looked like it had been vandalized by a graffiti artist. And not one of the good ones, either, just some kid with a lot of black spray paint and not much talent, albeit with a larger and more polite vocabulary than your average tagger.
Some of the other exhibits are pretty cool though. And for the ones that don't make sense, I just remember that the thing is put on by the Indianapolis Downtown Artists and Dealer's Association: IDADA.
Why did the Dadaist cross the road? Electric dumptruck!
I hate to say this, but I'd definitely cross the road to see a Cat 795F AC
ReplyDeleteIt just kills me to see that beautiful building wasted on stuff like this.
ReplyDeleteDid you know the old City Hall is the twin (more or less) of another building in this city?
As far as amusing acronyms go, it's hard to top the Institute of American Indian Arts, which used to share a campus with my alma mater. Why did the IAIA draw so many chuckles? Try chanting it repeatedly & slowly, with the accent heavily on the "A"s...
ReplyDeleteA whole lotta years ago, I worked at college hanging "art" in the school museum whenever a show came through.
ReplyDeleteFirst, the odd little Director did not consider anything before Jackson Pollack as art - and ol' Jackson himself was on the cusp. Kind of gives you an idea of the "art" we handled.
We hung one show that filled the whole 2-story museum. The main gallery was a huge space, with 12 foot tall light gray burlap fabric covered panels. We were told to leave 2 panels (8' wide each) open, as one artist insisted on hanging his own piece "to make sure it was right".
We worked day 1, came back day 2 to finish. The "artist" had appeared overnight and hung his "art" - which consisted of a seemingly randomly bent neon tube about 15 feet long, plugged in, hung diagonally over dark gray flocking sprayed directly on the burlap panels. That was it.
Other than the fact that the sprayed flocking ruined four burlap panels (over-spray?) which had to be replaced by the museum at the museum's expense.
From that walk-through, it looks like the exhibits are mainly bunches of TVs, and junk piles. Sorry, but I'm not impressed.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of my next band's name: Dada Mama.
ReplyDeleteWhen my kids were mere toddlers, I convinced them that a large nude statue of a well endowed female in the Baltimore Art Museum sculpture garden was actually modeled after their mom, my wife Nancy. Whenever we would walk past it I would call out, "Who is that statue, kids?" and they would run up to it, hug its knees, and yell out, "NANCY!"
ReplyDeleteThe payoff finally arrived when my wife went for a visit to the museum with us, the kids did their thing, and the look on her face made me fall down laughing.
Now, that was art!
Just wait. Time is the great filter.
ReplyDeleteEvery era has produced a great quantity of crap in the arts/music/popular culture. Most of it doesn't survive, and it's not missed.
Making art exhibitions out of video monitors was interesting when Nam June Paik was doing it.
ReplyDeleteHis 1994 "Electronic Super Highway" may be responsible for the "information superhighway" monicker the intertubes ended up with.
But it is hardly new and different today.