CAC's Weekend Art Thread

Los Angeles is the winner in the massive Rock Paper Scissors game amongst the nations largest cities, with it's newest rock star finally arriving amongst throngs of worshipers Saturday:

SMOD is here to dangle over your heads in a seismic zone

Levitated Mass should open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in April/May, per my sources. As an art lover and a conservative growing increasingly pessimistic about November, I cannot wait to walk under the 340 ton boulder.

When visiting LACMA, I am thankful for the Sunday "suggested donations" special. It makes me less irritated when visiting the Broad Contemporary. I love Richard Serra's work on level one. But the inclusion of the world's richest taxidermist? Damien Hirst irks me. His spot paintings take my ire to a totally different level:

Asshole never connects four.

So I was delighted to read Daniel Maidman's recent attempt to answer art critic Jerry Saltz's call for anyone who was game to make him a Hirst Spot. Maidman goes more into theory than I could ever hope to do (the difference between pretending to know what you are talking about and...actually knowing), and spots the fundamental flaw in Hirst's latest exercise in showing meaning is no object:

But look - is anybody going to look at a spot painting because of its aching humanity? Not unless they're autistic or schizophrenic. So when you balance one consideration - the humanity - against the other - the striking information-theoretic formalism - which facet of the spot paintings is more interesting? I think it's the formalism. And I think the flaw in the spot paintings is that Mr. Hirst, as evidenced in the episode with the five yellow spots, himself brings a residual humanity to his project which interferes with the most interesting part of its nature.

If you are desperate to add more bookmarks, Maidman's blog makes for a great read.

A year ago when I started doing the Art Thread, a moron brought up architecture. After re-watching Shock of The New again, why not?
Many repeatedly rant on the "awfulness" of modern art, yet few rant on the far more awful attempts by modern architects to take similar concepts and a desire for "a utopia made real" and...fail:

Start at the 2:03 mark, and let Robert Hughes guide you through the end result of planned utopian architectural fluff.

Submit your own artwork (JPEGs please, with title, dimensions, medium, year) to theoneandonlyfinn (at) gmail.com for mention on a future Art Thread.

posted by CAC at 04:01 PM

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