political art & cultural policy
In the wake of the recent racist attack on a Muslim cab driver in NYC, I’m particularly interested in the public reaction to the latest project by Tehran-born, Big Apple-based artist Amir Baradaran. For one week beginning September 9, Baradaran will debut Transient, a series of 40-second video installations infiltrating New York’s taxicabs.
Glenn Beck helped cement his reputation as a misinformed art critic today during his massive right-wing “Restoring Honour” rally, which was disturbingly organized on the anniversary — and in the exact location — of Martin Luther King’s historic “Dream” speech.
Perched in front of 300,000 monochromatic faces, Beck gave an architecture lesson concerning the design of the Washington Monument. The story is retold beautifully by L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, who goes on to explain the ironic hilarity of Beck’s latest folly.
The first official visit by UK Prime Minister Cameron to the White House on July 20, 2010 was watched closely by political pundits around the world. They both wore blue ties during their meeting — did this signify unity on foreign affairs? Was their body language cold or comfortable? Did they walk in stride? During their visit the media analyzed every move, but it was the traditional gift exchange that took the world by storm.
President Obama presented the Prime Minister with a signed lithograph by the famed American pop artist Ed Rucha. In exchange, the Prime Minister presented Obama with a graffiti canvas painted by UK tagger-turned-street artist Eine. With this simple gift, Cameron had instantly challenged conventions and redefined the boundaries of contemporary art.
The media have since described Cameron’s gift as an ‘eyebrow-raising gift of hoodie art’ whilst others have referred to the exchange as a ‘refinement and sophistication of transatlantic relations’ and having ‘established new heights of greatness in meaningful diplomatic gift-giving.’ But more than anything, the exchange has reignited the classic debate: is it art?
The success of prolific street artists such as Banksy and Os Gemos have catapulted street art into the spotlight in recent years resulting in evening art auctions and exhibits in prestigious galleries including the Tate Modern.
For years, seen as only vandalism, the scene has now been set to re-evaluate graffiti’s merit as an art form. But while the art world has been able to reflect upon this difficult aesthetic question, government authorities have been slower to change.
Graffiti artist Blu strikes a chord in his home country with a new giant mural in Grottaglie, Italy, famous for its olive trees, ancient ceramic tradition and new, ever-expanding waste dumps. As the artist’s contribution to FAME Fest, a yearly event inviting top urban artists to create street and gallery works, Blu chose to highlight the town’s growing problem with his work É Pronta la Torta (The Cake is Ready).
“Southern Italy is in real deep shit with the trash business. Grottaglie did not need the dump at all and people in town were not given any warning before it was already being built. Guess how come? Now we have trash coming from very far away and the dump seems to get bigger and bigger, there already are three huge lots full of trash and trucks get here daily from Northern Europe to deliver more shit.
This piece comes at the very right moment, considering that there are workers digging another huge hole in the ground near the dump. There are reasons to believe that they are going to create a fourth lot and again, our formidable town councilors are not telling anything to their own people. How morbid is this?” – FAME Fest founder Angelo Milano
Visit this site for additional images and info about Blu’s mural, and check out the award winning film Gomorrah to get a glimpse of the severity and situation surrounding Southern Italy’s toxic dumping problem.
It’s hard to be in Canada and blog about something other than the G20 riots and the gross treatment of citizens on the streets of Toronto this past Sunday, which Ezra addressed so fabulously in his post “The G20 summer blockbuster”. But here I am, talking instead about something affiliated with North America’s other contentious issue of the day – the oil spill.
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretagentarthur
Monday night saw a party of protesters outside Tate Britain, calling on the gallery to cut its ties to one of its large funding partners: BP.
As reported by the Guardian, “A group of artists under the name The Good Crude Britannia voiced concerns about the Gulf of Mexico oil spill,” and demonstrated outside of a launch party meant to display new art by Fiona Banner and to celebrate 20 years of BP support. Click to continue »
What do you get when you mix a postindustrial urban mess with a group of artists who want to make it better? In Windsor, the answer is Broken City Lab, a post-avant-garde art project whose object is the city itself and the social relations necessary to transform urban blight into community and prosperity.
Broken City Lab (BCL) is the brainchild of artists Justin Langlois and Danielle Sabelli that quickly attracted the interests of a handful of other artists – Josh Babcock, Michelle Soulliere, Cristina Naccarato, and Rosina Riccardo. The idea was to find a new way – other than protest, that is – to use art for social change. What they came up with is a fascinating series of public interventions rooted in art practices intended to energize and mobilize local interest in reimagining Windsor’s future.
Take an art show comprised entirely of works found in the trash, a soapbox derby, countless bands, guerilla theatre interventions, conceptual art pieces, picnics in strange places, video screenings and parades and you get a pretty interesting festival. Remove participation fees, unethical sponsorships, a heavy corporate presence and any form of censorship and replace those negatives with an inclusive community-based approach to the arts and you get the International Infringement Festival.
Created in Montreal in the summer of 2004 and thrown together in just a few months, the festival has managed to survive long enough to enter its seventh year and spread to various communities around the world as varied as Bordeaux, France and Ottawa, sometimes planting roots and continuing. This year, there are four stops on the Infringement circuit: Brooklyn, which already happened in May; Montreal, which gets underway in late June; Hamilton (for the first time) in early July; and Buffalo in the end of July and early August.
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