Roberta Smith's Sunday NYT piece, arguing that public art is enjoying a renaissance, puzzled Artsjournal's Tyler Green: "[Jeff Koons's] Balloon Dog (Yellow) couldn't be any further from public: It's owned by hedge fund-enabled impresario Steven Cohen. It is on temporary loan to the Met, where it sits stands on the roof."
What's got me scratching my skin is that Smith never mentions development in her analysis of trends in public art. Public sculpture was as dead as a doornail in the 1960s and 70s—but so were the cities where public sculpture is commissioned and seen. Can Smith be so sure that formal developments best explain why artists are working with cities more often now than they were then? What about why cities are more open to working with artists?
Peter Fuss, Who Killed Barack Obama?, 2008.
As Sam Boyd notes, it is something that this news hasn't made bigger waves in print and cable media: It's responsible. Endless, recycled speculation about a thwarted, disorganized, improbable assassination attempt would change the tenor of the race. The media haven't ignored the story: It's below the fold on the NYT homepage, and that's where it belongs.
Never forget, would-be nutjobs.
The Red October Chocolate Factory is one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture, not that you'd know, because it's not open to the public and Russian chocolate doesn't taste good. Still, it certainly looks like a place where revolutionary chocolate is made, and for that reason if no other it's treasured in Moscow.
It's no longer a house of chocolate, though. Last year, all of Krasny Octyabr's chocolate-y goodness—its nougat-factory center—was removed to the suburbs, leaving a pretty brick building with a funky sign primed for the sort of enormously expensive condos that paved the New Arbat. (Who wouldn't want to hold real estate situated inside one of the enduring symbols of Russian culture?)
Preservationists will passionately argue that evacuating Moscow's chocolate factory has left an empty shell that used to be home to part of Moscow's soul. If it does nothing else, contemporary art lives to fill this sort of void, hence Gagosian Gallery's preciously and yet ominously titled show, "for what you are about to receive", which opens next month inside Red October.
Now, Moscow is a very wealthy city, crowded by the newly rich who surfaced when Russia's industries were privatized and whose fortunes have enjoyed the rising tide of oil prices. There should be no surprise if the art market runs red with rubles. Tastemakers like Dasha Zhukova are steering Russian interest, and Russian investment, toward contemporary art. So long as Yuri Luzhkov, mayor of Moscow, is going to tear down old Moscow anyway, it might as well be contemporary art that takes its place.
Still. When Larry Gagosian comes to Moscow, filling a hollowed-out factory named after the Bolshevik revolution with Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, it's hard not to brand him as Woland from Master & Margarita on a return tour.
Two looks at the electronic whisper mute for saxophone. I don't live in a city quite so dense (or practice so frequently, ahem) that I feel that I'm disturbing roommates and neighbors too often. So I don't exactly need this. Plus it inhibits bell tones (i.e., low notes), some users say, leaving me to to wonder how useful this even is for practice. However, it appeals to me for reasons the developer probably never considered: as a way to potentially mute the acoustic sound while still projecting an amplified sound in a live setting using the mute/case's built-in pickup. That sound could be manipulated electronically, distorted, looped, and so on, with diminished acoustic interference. Which is possible with an electronic wind instrument that offers no native acoustic sound anyway, sure; but the e-sax whisper mute can be played with a standard saxophone—ideally, this 1935 Beuscher "Aristocrat"—affording all the same effects you can get with an EWI but sacrificing none of the action or subtlety. Of course you'd rather be playing a Selmer Varitone like Eddie Harris, but let's be realistic.
Still, even if it does look cool, the thing costs about twice what it would to just buy a Barcus Berry and try to project through the pre-amp and not through the bell—know what I'm saying?
Elsewhere, a four-piece bass clarinet ensemble covers Radiohead,
Spencer snags the best Biden headline.
There was no opportunity in the Guardian piece to make the point, but: Doesn't Pangu Plaza look like it could only serve as the hidden-in-plain-sight lair of the nefarious Mandarin? And on that tip, has there been a more unappealing concept/design package since Spiderman 2099?
Pangu Plaza is shaped like a dragon; it's seven football fields long; it's made of stone and television screens; and it's home to offices, a shopping mall, a "courtyard in the sky", and a seven-star hotel.
After crossing out persistent rumors that Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Henry Kissinger have made it their home-away-from-home (or straight-up home, in the case of Gates), the International Herald Tribune finds developers pitching the place this way:
[T]he owners of Pangu Plaza do acknowledge that "someone very, very important" resides in the building; that Buffett considered renting a courtyard space (all of which are on the top floor of the lower-rise buildings) and that Kissinger was a guest during the Olympics.It's hard to blame the developers for an article whose intent was to fish out quotes about what immensely wealthy and powerful clients the building attracts. Still, in an obvious showy sense but also as an unintended critique of explosive growth in Beijing, Pangu Plaza captures some sense of what's happening in this moment in China better than the Bird's Nest or CCTV Tower—truly, noteworthy buildings that Western architects might have built anywhere."We have had a lot of very important guests," said Cai Xiaomin, a spokeswoman for Beijing Pangu Investment, the Chinese developer.
The Olympic news peg is going to fade from view as quickly as the blue skies in Beijing but I hope to explore some related growth/architecture issues in greater depth. In the meantime you shouldn't deprive yourself of reading James Fallow's coverage, if you haven't been following his Beijing-bureau dispatches for the Atlantic. Start here and work backward.
That's the next Olympic stadium that architecture critics, professional and armchair alike, will be harping over four years from now, when the Games arrive in London. It's a curiosity that the Olympic Games have come to be defined in part by set-piece architecture. Beijing's success with Bird's Nest almost guarantees that the arms race will accelerate.
Among the many Olympic post-mortems you read today, please consider this piece I've written for the Guardian Web site about architecture that competes as the Olympians themselves do and why it's unhealthy.
On a side note, now that people everywhere are familiar with the work of Herzog & de Meuron (they are the architects behind the Bird's Nest), more people will relate with the residual anger I still feel over the blundered episode that was the University of Texas's near miss with a Herzog design.
Nam June Paik, Dadaikseon (the more the better), 1988. Erected for the Seoul Olympic Games. Youtube.
Games people play:
