Does anyone actually thinik Christo's art is art?

[TreasonousBastard]

Collectors love him, but I can't think of anything he's done that didn't look like Tyvek wrapping.

[jilln]

1. Yeah, I like it...

I don't claim to know much about art and I generally don't like paintings or sculptures, with exceptions. I like architecture and music most.

Anyway, all that to say that pretty much all I require of art is that it look good and yeah, I like his stuff. I also like Andrew Goldsworthy a lot.

[Karenina]

36. Wow! I just opened this thread

to post a link of Andy Goldsworthy's stuff!!!

http://www.sculpture.org.uk/image/504816331403

Neee-noooo-nee-noooo...

[jilln]

43. another case of...

great minds think alike!

[asthmaticeog]

2. Collectors?

How, exactly, does one collect a Christo? ;)

For the sake of actually answering your question, I like a lot of his work.

[name not needed]

3. It involves being impaled by an umbrella.

:P

[asthmaticeog]

11. DING DING DING DING DING

We have a winner!

[TreasonousBastard]

8. You go to his gallery and...

drop a lot of money for his drawings of the projects.

His drawings ARE nice. Very nice. And very expensive.

Years ago I used to hang out in the art world, and even had a few minor photography exhibitions of my own.

What we all tried to figure out was-- with all of the capable, and even excellent, artists in the world, how do some of them, like Christo, get into the big time?

[Susang]

9. His original drawings are worth quite a lot

It's how he funds his projects.

I adore Christos. I don't think everyone necessarily gets his art until they've actually seen it in person. His Central Park installation looks magnificent.

[asthmaticeog]

12. True -

his "Free Stamp" project in Cleveland sounded stupid as hell when it was under discussion, but once it was installed, I fell totally in love with it.

[Magrittes Pipe]

15. I prefer that mechanized bird-looking thing on Chester.

It's rad.

[Atlas Mugged]

33. I'm with you

Christo and Jean-Claude are on my top ten list of people that I would most like to have dinner with. Or brunch. Or just a casual imbiss.

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. No

it's just too silly

[tilsammans]

5. I do like it . . .

. . . being someone who sews and has done museum and trade show exhibits, I marvel at the planning and work it must take to make a project of such magnitude come together.

But I can see where others might find it ho-hum.

I look forward to seeing The Gates soon! I think it's great for NYC.

[JitterbugPerfume]

6. I do not care for it but

to each her / his own

[ashmanonar]

7. eh.

it can go either way. i have trouble seeing "art" sometimes, especially when it's like one black line on a white surface...or a splatter of paint (unless the splattered paint is applied in a specific way, to create an image, then it's cool)...

i'm an artist too. i just don't like the crappy modern art, that needs to be explained. art should be self-explanatory, sorta like a rorshache...it's not about what the artist intended, it's about what you see in the artist's work.

i do think christo's stuff is interesting, bc of the scale of it. instead of working with small-scale stuff, little paintings or whatever, he chooses to work with the world as a medium. i respect him for that.

[Ninga]

10. Totally unexpected.......orange, billowy, soft fabric dotting

the walk ways in Central Park.....a contrast of color and texture in a city park. The view from the sky is breathtaking. Isn't art after all an expression?

[JitterbugPerfume]

13. yes

i can see how that could be very beautiful as viewed from the air

and paint splotches applied by Jackson Pollack express more emotion and truth than most mere "pictures" Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

[TreasonousBastard]

30. I discovered something abut Pollack...

when I saw one of his in the Guggenheim.

Walking right past it, it was a huge display of blotchy color that was vaguely attractive.

When I walked around the helix and looked at it from the other side of the building, it suddenly made complete sens and was incredibly beautiful.

[ashmanonar]

17. no, i totally agree with art as an expression.

i'm just a literalist, i guess. if you've ever seen some of the modern art i'm talking about, you'd know why i'm not all that enthused with it. a couple squares and rectangles of different colors on a canvas isn't art.

[crispini]

18. Oh, man, but some of that stuff... totally sends me.

Maybe I'm just wacko, but I can spend half an hour with a Mondrian. Live, in person -- they don't reproduce well. It's so stripped down that it cannot possibly be anything other than the thing in and of itself. And they're beautifully constructed, if you look closely at the edges you'll see how nicely they are made. There's no meanin there at all except the lines and colors and how they are arranged.

Now, one swipe of a brush on a canvas, yeah. Not much to see there. Some of the really stripped down stuff is really interesting and some of it is just .... meh.

[ashmanonar]

19. yea...

i'm all for people being expressive, but if someone takes a dump on a plate and calls it art, does that really make it art?

[crispini]

20. A dump on a plate... I'd say "no," but ...

I don't even PRETEND to really know what "art" is anymore.

There seems to be this whole thing going on here in certain levels of art that I don't understand. But, when they do stuff like that, is it just pushing everything to an extreme?

I think that Christo's stuff is made interestingly, and is interesting to look at, and causes people to think about and do things that they would not have done otherwise -- case in point, this conversation. By and large, I think it's cool and I think it probably is "art," whatever that means. But :shrug: where's the line about what "art" is?

[ashmanonar]

23. that's precisely the point.

art isn't really art anymore, the artist wants to call it art so people don't just walk up to it and say "it's crap"

art isn't about putting your time and effort and creativity into a project, and portraying thee world around you or trying to make a point. it's about getting awards, and making money, and being well-known.

the best artists in teh world, at least most of them, were dirt poor when they died.

[crispini]

26. You don't think Christo's got a point?

I think he's talking very much about the way humans change the space about them.

And why should art have a point anyway? Isn't art really just about the thing-in-itself?

I dunno, I am so far removed from the "top" of the modern art world that I have no idea what is going on up there. I also learned a long time ago that the quickest way for me to fu*k up my own creativity was to wonder about what something meant, or whether or not it was "good enough" and whether or or not it conveyed a "point." I dunno, I am not a professional, I don't make money or exhibit stuff in galleries, all I know is, if I wanna sit around and weld stuff out of junk, I do that, and I don't care what anyone thinks of it. Maybe it means something, maybe it doesn't. I see the same kind of fine insouciance in Christo -- he just wants to wrap the Reichstag, he's not gonna tell you why or what it means -- so I can kinda dig that.

check this out (from the FAQ on their website)

Christo & Jeanne-Claude pay the entire cost of the artworks themselves. They earn all of the money through the sale of the preparatory studies, early works from the 50s and 60s and original lithographs on other subjects.

They do not accept grants or sponsorships of any kind. They do not accept donated labor (volunteer help). They do not accept money for things like posters, postcards, books, films, T-shirt and mugs or any other products at all. None.

Doesn't sound much like a sellout to me......

[ashmanonar]

27. i said before that i think christo is one of the better ones.

i'm talking more the guys who paint one line on a canvas and call it art. or the people who destroy stuff, weld stuff ONTO the destroyed stuff, and call it art.

christo is on another level from these people.

[crispini]

28. Ah, sorry, I missed that.

yeah, I have a problem with the paint-one-line-on-a-canvas folks as well.

later tater! :hi:

[ashmanonar]

29. lol

no problem. ciao!


on edit: NOOOOOO! i'm in the 700 club!

[TreasonousBastard]

31. Mondrian was one of the few geniuses...

whose art was born of his philosophy.

He was constantly working to get to the essence of his subject, and the "Boogies" were as far as he got. It takes a long time to feel the subject in them, but eventually there is the "Aha!" moment.

Personally, I love the walls he did on the way to the boogies. Some go for the mums, but I love the walls.

Not just a stone or brick wall, but the soul of a wall.

[amazona]

14. no it's self-promotion

The last thing we need to be doing is to encourage people to put more packaging on our environment.

He's a con artist.

I like good modern art. To this day, I often think of the Rothko room I saw in the Tate Museum years ago -- is it still there?

But I got no use for Christo, sorry.

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of communists
and other subversives. We intend to clean them out,
even if it means rounding up every birdwatcher in the country.
--John Mitchell, US Attorney General 1969-72

[wovenpaint]

16. I was going thru the photos of the Gates on Yahoo

and I really like it. I love the use of that flowing saffron orange against the neutrals of late winter landscape-it wouldn't work in the spring....orange is a very energetic color and is one of the least picked as "favorite color", interesting.
As a fiber artist myself, I'm amazed at the amount of planning that goes into these installations-and the transformations that are achieved by the textiles.
Imho, I believe Christo works are best when "experienced",(actually, so is most art) so I'm going to try to hop the bus to NYC before the 27th to see The Gates for myself.
I love the aerial photos!

[forgethell]

21. nope! n//t

[Withywindle]

22. Yes,of course it's art...

...All something needs to be art is intentionality, IMO.


Whether it's good art, now that's certainly open for lively debate!

[bloom]

24. yes...eom

[miss_kitty]

25. yes

i think it's art.

[terrya]

32. Art is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?

Personally, yes, I think Christo is an artist. Yes, it's art.

Fuck, some people think Thomas Kinkade is an artist. Go figure.

There will always be disagreements about what is art and what isn't.

T

[Rabrrrrrr]

34. Absolutely! I consider it art at a very high level.

[Bridget Burke]

35. Yes.

If someone says it's art, it's art. Whether or not you like it, whether or not anyone likes it--that's a different thing.

And--if you say you're an art critic--you're an art critic!

[Karenina]

37. It's a HAPPENING!!!

Christo and Andy Goldsworthy have an outdoors fan in me! What FUN for NYC! A FREE EVENT to experience and all the grumpy folks can enjoy their griping. Sounds like a win-win to me! :D

[ChavezSpeakstheTruth]

38. Don't be a hater!

[ProfessorGAC]

39. I Don't Like It, But It's OK To Call It Art, I Think

It seems more like performance art, since it's the action of doing it that's the artistic statement. (Wrapping a bridge, for instance. It's still the same bridge, nothing has been done to alter the overall aesthetic, but the action of wrapping it is the art piece.)

I think it tends to be monotonous and pedestrian, but if ANYBODY sees it as art, it's art.
The Professor

[begin_within]

40. It's theater. The best one was the curtain in Rifle, Colorado in 1972.

[WindRavenX]

41. I like it

Art is art. It's completely subjective. Just because I think it is art doesn't mean it is, and just because someone else thinks it isn't art doesn't mean that it isn't art.

[DS1]

42. Not on your life

:eyse: <- art