Art?

I'm pretty ignorant/indifferent when it comes to Art (the expensive, capitalized kind you find in galleries). I can, and do, go on endlessly about Theatre, Literature, Music and Film, but my knowledge of the other stuff, the stuff that used involve canvas and marble and now involves human remains and feces, is admittedly lacking. In a conversation about anything that happened after the 19th century, art-wise, I'm basically confined to smiling and nodding.

If forced to express an opinion, I would say that I have no problem hearing about why 500 rubber chickens hanging from the ceiling of a black box with the sound of cash register ringing in the background, say, is a meaningful critique of factory farming, or a witty commentary on art as product, or whatever, I'm not especially interested in actually seeing it. If more work went into the artist's statement than into the piece itself, then reading the statement is, to me, a better use of my time than seeing the thing it explains. Once I know why some one believes that a chipped tea cup with a single raven's feather in it is worth putting on a pillar in a gallery, there's no need for me to haul my ass there and look at it; I've seen a tea cup before, I've seen a feather, I can extrapolate.

On the other hand, if that some one had painstakingly fashioned an exact replica of a tea cup with a feather in it out of plastic, or spam, or the hair of 1989 Pink Jubilee Barbie Dolls, I'd be all about seeing it in person, whether the rationale for doing so was interesting or not. I might look at it more in the way that I'd look at Corn Palace or the world's largest ball of twine than in the way I'd look at The Death of Marat, but I'd definitely be intrigued.

So, there's art whose concept is more important than it's execution, to which I typically say "Meh, who needs to see it, then?" And there's art whose execution is more important than it's concept, which may not even bother with a concept, to which I mostly say, "Sure, I'll gawk at that."*

But not until now have I said "I would like to be that art!"

In the New Museum’s first triennial survey, “The Generational: Younger Than Jesus,” (because all the artists were under 33, I suppose), Chu Yun hired women to come to the museum and sleep in the middle of the gallery all day.



Seriously. How do I get that job? Icelandic Elf Inspector has just been bumped to second place on my Most Desired Form of Employment list.

You may also enjoy this condescending take on the exhibit's opening:

"Four floors of self-referential young-person art dealing with young-person topics. Think new-media references like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, Internet jargon (e.g., “OMG”)"

Now, I make no judgements on whether or not any of the art presented was any good, since I a) don't care to do enough research to figure it out and b) am not qualified to make that judgement anyway. But I find it funny how the things called "young-person topics" are mostly things that the agéd media has been squawking with alarm about ("Good heavens, have you heard that the childrens are sending naked pictures of themselves? Also, I fear they use poor grammar and baffling acronyms!")

What should art explore, if not the human experience? What is unique about the turn-of-the-21st-century human experience, if not our unprecedented access to each other's personal ephemera? If anything, young people should be faulted for failing to try and find what's meaningful about the strange combination of inerconnectedness and isolation internet life imposes. Those of us who were teenagers when the online community went mainstream are in a unique position to appreciate how it changed the way we socialize, the way we access information, the way we experience life (or, perhaps, fail to experience it in favor of "documenting" it).

Whatever, though. The real point is, how do I get paid for sleeping? I'd be awesome at it:





*And, of course, there's art which inventively employes craft in service of an idea. You know, the good kind.