Blog On Vacation

I'm taking a blog vacation. I planned to do this a few weeks ago, but somehow I just kept posting. There are some other projects I need to focus on. So have a great week. Or two.

Bye!

Illegal Art Cont.: Spraypaint and Lightbulbs

Feik, via Eyegunk

After writing about Illegal Art and copyright, I started seeing different kinds of illegal art everywhere. Note that in the center of the graffiti by Felik in San Paolo is a birdcage holding a can of spray paint. :)

In Hungary, 'Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art' wasn't deemed art by the authorities (via ArtMargins):

In the summer of 2008, János Sugár exhibited the sentence "Wash your dirty money with my art" at the Kunsthalle, Budapest, as part of an exhibition entitled What's up?(1). Parallel with exhibiting the sentence in this safe context, he also displayed it on the pavement in front of and on the wall of two private art institutions in Budapest. Soon after this, one of these institutions sued him for damaging its property. After Sugár's exhibition at the Kunsthalle it was easy to identify him as the artist, and soon Sugár was summoned by the police and prosecuted. Sugár admitted that he had sprayed the sentences and added that he considered them a continuation of the art work he had earlier displayed at the Kunsthalle. However, Sugár's gesture was not deemed art by the authorities and was classified as vandalism.

Street art might be par for the course, but no lightbulbs in Europe...?

LIGHTS OUT FOR LIGHTBULB ARTWORKS? via ArtForum
Come September 1, the European Union has banned the sale of traditional lightbulbs with a glowing filament. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s Till Briegleb reports, the ban will have an impact on art, specifically works that use lightbulbs for either functional, aesthetic, or historical effects. A case in point is the work of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov, who often hangs a bare lightbulb in his installations as a melancholic homage to the Soviet-era ideal of electricity, which was not always available to the citizens.
“Unfortunately, there are no exceptions to [the law] 2005/32/EG” writes Briegleb. “And thus artists, restorers, and museum technicians find themselves faced with the bizarre necessity of small-time criminality.” Kabakov is not the only artist to use bulbs. There are 140 in Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space-Modulator; the German post–Word War II “Zero” Group was fond of lightbulbs. There’s a host of contemporary artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Valie Export, Stephan Huber, Isa Genzken, Mike Kelley, and Adrian Paci. Even artists who did not work explicitly with lightbulbs have used them: Rauschenberg, Kienholz, Tinguely, and Beuys.

Sore, Grumpy, And Not Writing About Art

I was happily, innocently biking home yesterday afternoon, rushing along because of some dark storm clouds in the air. I was in the bike lane going down Avenue A, a relatively calm bit of traffic. I was just thinking I was going to beat the rain home, when a cab door opened in front of me. 3 seconds later I was on the ground. OWW!

So may I suggest, if you are getting out a cab and for some reason get out on the street side rather than the curb, that you look to see if anyone's coming? Lucky for the cab it was just me. If it had been a car instead, it would have knocked the door off. And I may say 'just me', but really I want to let lose a torrential babble about how I could have been seriously injured and how unattractive my bruises are. Anyhow, that's the justified crankiness talking.

Aside from the girl who opened the door (who is probably normal and not a malicious idiot), everyone was so helpful. I'd rather have a bike accident in Manhattan than anywhere else--there's no end of good Samiritans. Out of nowhere a man started yelling at the girl for me , another guy helped pick up my bike, two were giving medical advice, someone else refixed my bike basket onto my bike and squashed it in the back of the cab, and the cabbie took me home.

Now I need to pop up to Union Square for something, but--sigh--I really don't want to take my bike this morning.