Friday, November 20, 2009

Makes my head hurt...

... an Arts Council project that typifies the standards we’ve come to expect from publicly funded art. Jarvis Cocker, the country’s foremost socialist pop musician, was sent to the Arctic for “inspiration” and to raise planetary consciousness, along with another two dozen artistic luminaries:
The ambition of the expedition was to inspire the creative team to respond to climate change... It was an amazing journey; 10 days of artistic inspiration, debate, discussion and exploration.
The ecological insights gleaned by Mr Cocker?
Men have produced a lot of great art over the centuries, or whatever... but... an iceberg kind of, basically, pisses on it.
Apparently this was a $250,000 publicly funded art project. Read all about it here.

2 comments:

Mr Dragon said...

it;s very nice!

The Right Reverend James W. Bailey said...

Lenny,

I shared some thoughts over at J.T. Kirland's Facebook site that I'll share here:

What's wrong with conemporary artists is that they're not as smart and bold of vision as bankers and auto execs. If AIG or General Motors had proposed this, they'd have gotten $250,000,000 in stimulus funds for it. Too many contemporary artists are way undervaluing their work in an econonmy that spitting billions of tax dollars down the drain over one scheme after another. The first artist that's bold enough to propose a multi billion dollar public art project will probably see their project funded because of the sheer daring of that artist to ask for so much money. Sorta like a certain general asking for 40,000 more troops to win a certain war. Generals always ask for more than they need. Artists need to start thinking like generals.

GRANT PROPOSAL TO THE NEA:

RE: PROJECT BOMB URANUS WITH JEANNE-CLAUDE ICE CRYSTALS

TOTAL COST OF THIS PUBLIC ART PROJECT: $54,639,534,412.68

SCOPE OF PROJECT:

Artist proposes, in collaboration with the U.S. Airforce, NASA and Northrop Grumman, to build a spacecraft capable of travelling to the planet Uranus for the purpose of bombing the planet with ice crystals made from the cryogenically frozen body of the artist Jeanne-Claude. The purpose of this public art project is to measure whether or not human DNA deposited on another planet can impact global climate change. This public art project is inpired in part by the film Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. In addition, this public art project hopes to inspire an even larger scale future public art project. The artist, believeing that Christo, the holder of Jeanne-Claude's katra, will be compelled to one day travel as the first living human being to Uranus where he Christo will wrap in the planet in aluminum foil, thus increasing the visibility of this planet as seen from Earth one hundred fold.