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What gets me is that in a world where artists often experiment with viewer interactivity, sometimes you just can't tell what in a museum you're supposed to touch and what you're not supposed to touch.
There was a huge retrospective exhibition of Yoko Ono's work at Musee d'Art Contemporain in Lyon, France in 2016. Included were a mixture of interactive/participatory elements (ladders you were meant to climb, a room filled with hammers and nails that you were supposed to contribute to by banging a nail into whatever you wanted) and other obviously not interactive elements (videos, paintings, things protected by glass).
And I remember, in the same room as the ladders you could climb and combat helmets suspended from the ceiling by ropes that were swinging around because people were walking through them, was a sheet of either canvas or paper mounted on the wall, with another piece of either canvas or paper suspended about an inch in front of it by some string, with some holes cut into the front sheet so that you could just see that there was something drawn or written on the hidden layer.
Well, in a room filled with people talking and laughing and climbing ladders and pushing helmets around, I went to peek behind the curtain and lifted up the front layer to take a look at the one behind.
A custodian ran at me and told me to step away. I still don't know if I damaged it or participated in it.
"You might think I'm interacting with pieces that are not supposed to be touched, but I'm actually providing a valuable commentary on how even in the subjective realm of art, ego seeks the power to maintain control and enforce 'approved behavior' upon what are equal expressions of art"
"Sir, we need to ask you to leave"
"See, you do get it!"
Two Naked Men Jump into Tracey's Bed
The Bed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed
The Naked Men: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cai_Yuan_and_Jian_Jun_Xi
> The artists were detained but no further action was taken.
See, the detainment was part of the performance. It symbolized the futility of consequence, commented on the ephemeral attention of the general public, and highlighted that no one is surprised that tracey has naked men jumping into her bed
> sometimes you just can't tell what in a museum you're supposed to touch and what you're not supposed to touch.
In one pop sculpture exhibition, I stared so long at a coffee machine until an attendant came over and asked me if there was a problem with the refreshments.
Are there any documented studies where art experts were challenged to differentiate between:
- abstract paintings by someone universally regarded as "good", and something done by a very young child?
- a piece of new, legitimate, modern art vs maybe a pile of random things from a junkyard
I'm aware it might just be me that's confused, but I have a suspicion much of the abstract and/or modern art world is void of value...that is, without lots of context about the artist and their intentions.
Your comment reminds me of a scene in "The Great Beauty" where the little girl expresses her tantrum with buckets of paint hurled on a very large canvas. The grown-ups stood back, fascinated, it was kinda obscene.
Here's an interesting article that addresses your question (well, partially):
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/03/1...
Why should context not matter for art (or anything else really)? Suppose you come across a what appears to be a picture of Mozart in the sand on a beach. Doesn't it matter to your understanding of what you see if it was drawn by an artist, the happenstance by the motion of the waves, or a crawling turtle?
> "maybe a pile of random things from a junkyard"
I definitely thought one exhibit at a modern art museum was junk from a remodel or something, because it was a pile of drywall, plastic sheeting, and other types of normal construction junk.
Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist
http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/pierre_brassau_monkey_ar...
My boss has some art in his apartment; whenever he's dialed in over video from home, I try to figure out if it's drawn by his nieces and nephews, or is worth $15,000 per.
I was a museum security guard and a patron was confused. " can I sit there " he asked. " sure It's just a bench"
Though they had an art toys exhibit where the line was less clear. especially the playground jungle gym based art. The signs did little to stop kids..
I was at a local art school's grad show having a conversation with an old friend. Over a few minutes a small crowd formed and was staring at the liquor license on the wall that was in front of us.
If something speaks to you, don't let anybody hold you back :)
There is a sadistic installation at the MoMA, which is a single, fine steel filament suspended from ceiling to floor. There is a small weight on the floor holding it taught, but otherwise the wire is nearly invisible as you walk through the space. I imagine that is very much the point, but I do not know whether installing it right in the middle of a busy room was also a directive from the artist. In any case, the end result of these perplexing decisions is that a security guard has to be dedicated to stand next to this single piece, all day long, advising people not to bump into it. I cannot imagine a job more Sisyphean.
> I cannot imagine a job more Sisyphean.
For what it's worth, if you go to see (or interact) with Maurizio Cattelan's "America"[1] at the Guggenheim in New York, it is a staffer's job to stand by the door and check on it after every person's visit.
(After my turn, I asked the staffer if that was the weirdest job they'd ever had to do, and she said that it wasn't; perhaps she had previously worked at the MoMA.)
1: https://www.guggenheim.org/exhibition/maurizio-cattelan-amer...
The SFMOMA had a Bruce Conner exhibition recently that displayed his artwork TOUCH/DO NOT TOUCH [1] which had to have a guard stationed out front full time whose sole job was telling patrons they couldn't touch the artwork that said "touch" on it.
You reminded me of this:
Geez. I'm trying to be understanding, but if your work was mistaken for garbage...
It's like someone tossing my code because it looked like the output of /dev/random...
Let's just say that comments are important when you write Perl.
Considering they called it 'auto-destructive' art; I think the point was that it would eventually be thrown away on accident. I love this.
I was in Manchester Museum recently, looking at samples of Mars and Moon rocks etc., and in classic British wry humour, there was an all caps sign exhorting us to "PLEASE TOUCH".
Problem solved :)
A physics professor in college brought a meteorite to class and wanted everyone to touch every nook and cranny of that thing because it was high in iron and our oils helped keep it from rusting.
I leaned against some shelving at a museum once. Turns out it wasn't shelving, but some unlabeled art. shrug
Did the info/explanation of the piece or the program not indicate whether it was interactive or not?
My uncle works in art-work transportation, and some of the pieces are basically not transportable, but are travelling from museum to museum anyway.
He remembers a charcoled doorframe, that had to be transported although it basically could come apart any second once moved. They have vibration reducing special boxes, with the same climate protection as humidors have it. Also there are titanic insurance fees at work, to move art. And sometimes, somebody in some state run museum, is forced to take the cheapest option available. One of those haulers venturing into art, transported a artwork by a Chinese artists (do not know the name), basically very long paperrolls with Chinese letters on them to be hung from a halls ceiling. Those rolls they come in cardboard boxes, sealed with tape- and the poor fellow, takes a cutter, and systematically, cuts through the tape that seals all the boxes. Each box a artwork, insured for 25.000€ - sliced.
...so is making fragile art and collecting the insurance a common scam or what? <_<
Not implying that this time was a scam, but I gotta think some people do it.
So like how was he supposed to open the boxes if not by cutting the tape? Or were the boxes intended to never be opened?
Cut the sides, peel off the tape? Or maybe he used a box cutter with a long blade? Either way, it's not his fault
> Either way, it's not his fault
I don't know about that. If you take a job transporting art, it's your job to understand what you're transporting.
And at no point are you supposed to open boxes like that, anyway, no matter what you're transporting - when I unloaded the truck at a department store, they drilled into us that that's a very good way to slice through a rack of t-shirts or pants or whatnot.
I suppose if you're going to make an artwork look like a bench and not surround it with protection, then you'd best make it function as a bench too.
Assuming the artwork did look like a bench, I would like to know what the artist thought of the incident. I imagine if you make a bench out of chicken-wire and styrofoam, it would be very entertaining to hear that someone sat on it and broke it. (I skimmed the article she wrote on the experience, however, and it seems like the resemblance to an actual bench was "vague" at best, so I assume it wasn't just some silly fake bench at all.)
One of the more beautiful mishaps in the OP's article is at the end, telling of a child who accidentally broke a sculpture an artist had spent over 2 years crafting and subsequently dedicated to her daughter. I imagine what the artist would think, making her perfect sculpture only to have it eventually come out broken – a fate not dissimilar from raising a child, such as her daughter whom the sculpture was dedicated to. Also, to be broken by another child in such a context would be delightfully sad. The fact that she renamed the sculpture "Broken" afterward is small, depressing turn of course.
Yes, I would have thought that would be entirely predictable. I love art but seriously some art museums are UX nightmares. Looks like a bench, something present in nearly every museum ever but this one is actually art and you can't sit on it.
The SFMOMA actually has a bench that is also art that is fine for sitting on, but has a nearby sign warning people to not stand on it.
On a slight tangent, does flash photography damage paintings?
I see always people using flash in museums. I assume it's because they don't know how to turn it off.
Here's an article investigating the subject: http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/mhe1000/musphoto/flashphoto2.htm
tl;dr: "Clearly, flashes from 'smartphones' cannot be regarded as a conservation threat in any properly lit gallery."
One wonders, though, about the flash units in modern digital mirrorless/SLR's. They can be quite bright, and since the cameras have UV filters on the sensor already (and many people use additional UV filters over the lens) there's a good chance minimizing UV emissions from the flash was not high on their list of priorities.
It is because they don't know how to turn it off, but also it does not damage paintings.
I'm totally theorycrafting, but if sunlight can make things age and fade (ex: books), wouldn't the light from cameras build up to do some amount of damage as well? Or is the wave spectrum of the two substantially different so that this analogy is moot?
It depends on the pigments used in the painting. Some are known to be unstable.
Where are you from? Most museums I visited specifically banned flash photography. In fact, most banned all photography.
Yes, flash definitely damages paintings.
Museums that ban photography do so for copyright reasons. The radiant energy of the camera flash is minuscule compared to the energy of the other photons lighting whatever you're looking at.
Don't leave canvas paintings out in the sun.
In fact, most banned all photography.
That's almost always because of overprotective display and reproduction rights agreements, not physical protection of the works themselves.
yes, I know they specifically ban flash photography. Hence my question.
Where am I from? I've lived the New York City area for about 20 years. Does that help?
However, I've visited museums in London, Paris, Madrid, Rome, Munich, etc. You see it everywhere. Once in the Musée D'Orsay it was so bad, I mentioned it to some workers as I was leaving.
That traveling gaming museum that used to show up at E3... one year I was looking at a table covered in handhelds, and I saw a Sega Nomad in its box. I'd never seen one in person, so I opened the box and took it out. I was promptly yelled at "Hey! We'd like to keep that in the box!"
Well why didn't you just bring the empty box then?
Because... they wanted to keep the Nomad in the box.
Odd to put it on a table with many other handhelds you were encouraged to pick up and look at.
Clicked the link on my iphone, turns out I had artsys app installed and got deep linked into it, then was greeted with a login screen, no way to skip and not the article.
Hunted and pecked for it on my home screen, and uninstalled it
Move fast and break shit!
Children have been doing that for ages.