Performance Art or Science?

Somewhere Sartre is watching smugly...

Gaugin is big in Japan

(Click the image for the full painting)

There's a GREAT article in the Boston Globe today about the Gauguin masterwork "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?" which is visiting the MFA's sister museum in Japan and causing all sorts of awe-struck wonder:

One woman in the throng of admirers stood in front of the painting and cried. Another had just driven 2 1/2 hours from Osaka to be among the first to get close to it. "I felt goose bumps in my skin," she said after she did. A third, in halting English, struggled to explain the significance of the work, a dark and ambitious meditation on the meaning of human existence. "The picture purifies us," she said exuberantly. "It gives us power and energy."

The Globe story delves deeper into this quasi-religious fervor over the painting noting:

Though the enormous painting is set in Tahiti and has never been seen before in Asia, the Japanese embraced it with a kind of fanaticism usually reserved for their baseball players. Gauguin's work is much loved in Japan, where it has a special resonance, with its subtle references to Buddhism, its embrace of the natural world, and the deep Zen-like riddle of its title...To enhance the visual experience, the Nagoya museum created an unusual viewing setup: Visitors ascend a few steps to stand on a raised platform, as though approaching a venerated shrine

Two thoughts:

1) When was the last time a painting visiting the MFA in Boston caused this kind of jubilation? Even Hopper's "Nighthawks" which took a trip to the MFA two years ago wasn't set up over a raised platform!

2) It's stories like this one that make me glad the Globe is still around: revealing, thoughtful, international but with a Boston focus.

LEAVE FAIREY ALONE!

Sad news coming out of Boston as the forces of art and the forces of Boston's jack-ass PD/conservative Sox-obsessed culture do battle; their focal point? Shepard Fairey. Fairey, the artist behind the Andre the Giant Obey images, the Obey clothing line, and the Obama Hope poster is enjoying his first retrospective at Boston's Institute for Contemporary Art. I saw it, it rocked, check it out.


Fairey is also very hot.


Fairey was arrested feet from the Institute of Contemproary Art on years-old vandalism charges as he made his way to his exhibit's opening night party in February. He was taken away and booked. This caused major annoyance among the ICA attendees who were waiting for Fairey to DJ an opening night party, tickets to which cost mucho dinero. At first Fairey's arrest seemed to have some silver linings: Fairey got his high-art cred and street cred affirmed on the same day! And as the Boston Phoenix suggested back in February, the orginal arrest might have been nothing more than political gamesmanship; payback for the mayor's recent strong-arm tactics with the police union during budget cuts, coupled with the Mayor posing for a photo-op with Boston's most infamous tagger.

Unfortunately things took a darker turn yesterday as 7 criminal complaints were dropped and the remaining 10 were upgraded from misdemeanors to felonies. This means that Fairey is now potentially facing a maximum penalty of 30 YEARS IN PRISON! Had the charges remained misdemeanors at most he would have paid $1000 in fines plus restitution.

In addition to the Boston charges, Fairey faces 12 seperate criminal complaints in Roxbury

Are we sensing a certain degree of double-standards here? Is Fairey getting the felony counts because he's so well known? What message does this send to Boston area artists?

I stand by my orginal solution: Obama should pardon Fairey. That Hope poster wasn't just iconic in its aesthetics, it perfectly packaged the candidate as patriotic, bold, new, and (yes) hip. Obama owes Fairey. And this is rapidly turning into a ridiculous cluster-fuck that's an embarrassment for Boston. And seriously, do we really need to add to our clogged prison systems' woes by sentencing a street artist to prison for 30 years?????