At this moment, my wife and I are attempting to guess that if the Turkish military invades northern Iraq, then will our long planned and long desired trip to Istanbul be ruined. Today the Turkish prime minister signaled that he would support an attack against the Kurdish rebels after the suicide bomb in central Ankara. Our plane leaves in 36 hours. In any case, Turkey, Germany or Florida, I am taking a vacation for two weeks from the Blog. Here are a few sites of civicly coordinated volunteer artworks. Please send me more sites. Postal … [Read more...]

The cows, the horses, the flamingos, the gators, the swans and now - the Globes - well Cool Globes. ( Great marketing pun. ) Home of the first American fiberglass on parade, Chicago puts the first "content" on the fun vaudeville displays. Called Vaudeville since the works are full of mild humor, bad puns, mediocre get-ups, gaudy colors, shiny things and a lot of noise. The events are the only American visual art displays that include artists of all ilk - museum, gallery, crafts, amateur, children and untrained celebrities. We all claim to … [Read more...]

Buckingham Guard and Gormley Casting (Photo by Edz, Flickr) In London, Antony Gormley spreads cast-iron multiples of his own nude body across the skyline near the Hayward Gallery. (At Art Basel Miami last December, I noticed that all the naked people in the artworks were male.) The sculpture is a factual, asexual self-representation without any spirit or energy. It just is. He uses a pose that mimics the comfortable "attention" posture of the Buckingham Palace guard - a real person playing the role of an interchangeable, repeating generic … [Read more...]

For many years, I have believed that painters make better architects than sculptors. Painters and architects share a love for the contradiction of the illusion of space and the reality of the object. They succeed with the visual beauty of shaped stuff in a contained volume and with the felt relationships trapped in the volume. Sculptors like the stuff too much. The architecture of the sculptors tends towards elaborate construction methods to celebrate the stuff. Weight dominates. Space dissipates. Public Art Administrators in Miami Break … [Read more...]

So we live in time of virtual motion. After many years of special effects in action adventures shot after Star Wars, we have "direct" experience with fast, twisting motion through space. Billions of humans know things about motion that have never been experienced. Any water cooler conversation can discuss the feeling of a high-speed chase on the ground or through the air. Video by Rhett Nye Motion has had a huge influence on architects and many have attempted to capture this spirit since the beginning of the 20th century. Frank Gehry and … [Read more...]