Ceci n'est pas un record store

The Wall Street Journal has an article about No Longer Empty's latest project, a recreation of a record store in a vacant space in Manhattan.

Ted Riederer and 40 other artists have created the mock "shop," which will include record albums that have their covers blacked out except for a few words. Visitors flip through the stack to read a poem. It's a piece that Mr. Riederer calls a "love letter" to the dying concept of a record store. "My goal is ... to have them in the store for 30 minutes until they realize it's not a store," he says.

Luckily, being located in Athens, Ga., we still have record stores, including ones that sell LPs, but the concept is still a fun use for an empty space.

Ceci n'est pas criticism

LentSpace, the Canal Street space acting as a temporary public art and sculpture park about which intern Aurelie Frolet wrote earlier this week, has been vandalized, according to Curbed. Spraypainting "this is not art" on something that's clearly a piece of art is a fairly arty gesture in and of itself, though, isn't it?

Art Around Athens

Tonight at Ciné at 8 p.m. is an interesting art project, Goldenfiction, by Goldensection, a.k.a., Casey Scott. Goldenfiction is apparently "a projected mixture of images and text set to an original musical score." Scott has a Facebook page with a little more information, including a couple of tracks you can listen to if you click on the "My Band" tab. It's very sound-collagey, but it certainly sounds worthy of a Wednesday evening, especially as it's only $5.

Link

Nicholas Knight's sentence diagrams combine grammar and art, and their scale, we think, lends them a great deal of beauty. Knight has a lot of other projects, including a blog, but we think the diagrams are the most arresting.

Public Art and the Media

We were checking out Flavorpill today, and it prompted some thoughts about public art. One of the daily links was to "Play Me I'm Yours," a project by Luke Jerram that involves the set up of numerous pianos around a city, in various states of repair, for the public to play. As the statement on the website says, "Who plays them and how long they remain is up to each community. The pianos act as sculptural, musical, blank canvases that become a reflection of the communities they are embedded into. Many pianos are personalised and decorated." It's a neat work of art and the kind of thing everyone wants in his or her own town, right?

Flavorpill also linked to Heather Tweed's page, actually to show off her fuzzy Anubis sculptures, but poking around there, we found her "Lost not Found: Abscission," which doesn't give a lot of details but appears to be a similar use of public space for an interactive art project: "The artist will be secreting small artworks at various locations across Edinburgh City centre, finders are requested to follow the attached instructions to participate in the project and keep the artwork. Please visit again over the course of the project for updates, participants and final outcome."

So why do our buttons get so happily pushed by this kind of interactive, public art? If you're a member of the media, including bloggers, pieces of this sort are certainly easier to write about. There's more to do than just stand there and contemplate. And there's no entrance fee. But should they take precedence over more traditional gallery installations? Should we stop pointing to the efforts of artists to shake up everyday life and create consciousness about art as a living, evolving thing?

Deja Vu

When we started reading about Jasper Joffe's latest project, "The Sale of a Lifetime," in Art Daily, it rang a bell. Joffe plans to sell "all his possessions, including his collections of paintings, drawings, teddy bears, and rare books. He will only keep the clothes he is wearing. The number 33 will be a recurrent theme throughout the exhibition, which will be installed in 33 different lots, all for sale for £ 3,333, as Biblical reference to death and rebirth."



John Freyer went about this same kind of project in a slightly different way, putting all his possessions up on eBay, including, eventually, the domain name at which he catalogued his sales. And then there's Luke 12:33, which does encourage you to sell all your stuff but doesn't, in any translations listed at that link, say anything about making an art project out of the experience.