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Art without the artist
Boston Globe ^ | January 6, 2008 | Geoff Edgers

Posted on 01/08/2008 1:43:14 PM PST by forkinsocket

TARA DONOVAN'S PINS are hard to miss. There are thousands of them upstairs at the new Institute of Contemporary Art. They're smushed together almost as if dropped into a trash compactor, except instead of being bent, they form a 3½-foot-tall block of sinewy, shiny metal. This is art, and it sits in the center of a gallery at the ICA, one of the signature pieces of the museum's collection.

Stare at "Untitled (Pins)," and you're likely to have questions. How does this cube stick together? Is it solid or a kind of pin shell? And what of the artist? Did Donovan get pricked as she manipulated the piece? Was she wearing protective gloves? What kind of care and persistence did it require for her to turn these thousands of glittering pins into such a perfect square?

One thing you might not expect: Donovan didn't put "Untitled (Pins)" together at all. The New York City artist figured out how to shape a mass of pins and sent instructions to the museum; the work was assembled in July, and again in August, entirely by the hands of ICA employees.

Surprised? Don't be. Like any museum of contemporary art, the ICA is full of works built by somebody other than the artist, from Kelly Sherman's Foster Prize-winning "Wish Lists," a collection of personal wish lists gathered from the Internet, to "Cell (Hand and Mirror)," a mysterious Louise Bourgeois piece featuring a pair of carved marble hands in the center of miniature room.

(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: art; artists
In a contemporary art museum, it's now fair to expect that chunks of a collection were never touched by the artist at all.
1 posted on 01/08/2008 1:43:15 PM PST by forkinsocket
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To: forkinsocket
Thos thread is of no value without photos.

:)

2 posted on 01/08/2008 1:48:12 PM PST by theDentist (Qwerty ergo typo : I type, therefore I misspelll.)
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To: forkinsocket

Which is to say that art museums now display things which may be of some interest to those intent on reading into what is simply there some ulterior meaning, but which, failing to have been intelligently constructed, have no internal logic, convey no meaning, and have no constraint. They are therefore not art.


3 posted on 01/08/2008 1:55:23 PM PST by BelegStrongbow (what part of 'mias gunaikos andra' do Episcopalians not understand?)
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To: forkinsocket

The emperor is getting a tad chilly right about now.


4 posted on 01/08/2008 1:58:04 PM PST by SlowBoat407 (Just how will wrecking the U.S. economy save the planet?)
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To: forkinsocket

This beggars the question of who is real artist. Is it the person who came up with the original concept? Or is it the person/people who actually did the work? Or some combination thereof?

Extend this question to filmworks - who is the artist there? The scriptwriter? Or the actor? Or both?


5 posted on 01/08/2008 1:58:23 PM PST by Hegemony Cricket (Although most dead people vote democrat, aborted babies, if given the choice, would vote Republican.)
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To: theDentist

6 posted on 01/08/2008 2:03:31 PM PST by BubbaBasher (WWW.TWFRED08.COM)
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To: BubbaBasher

Well... maybe it is of more value without photos.


7 posted on 01/08/2008 2:06:46 PM PST by theDentist (Qwerty ergo typo : I type, therefore I misspelll.)
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To: forkinsocket
That's not art. Now THIS is art:

(Rick Meyerowitz) .

8 posted on 01/08/2008 2:10:46 PM PST by Jeff Chandler (Hillary Clinton: Cankles, Cackle, and Cuckold.)
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To: BelegStrongbow
Which is to say that art museums now display things which may be of some interest to those intent on reading into what is simply there some ulterior meaning, but which, failing to have been intelligently constructed, have no internal logic, convey no meaning, and have no constraint.


I'm not sure this even qualifies as a sentence, let alone a lucid definition of art.
9 posted on 01/08/2008 2:11:49 PM PST by macamadamia
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