The Kidnapped Sculpture - "Don't Go Breaking My Art!" Last week a sculpture was "kidnapped" off a London street. "The kidnappers, who call themselves AK47, have headlined their ransom note: "Don't go breaking my art" - believed to be a cryptic reference to the Elton John/Kiki Dee No 1 hit from 1976. They state: "We are AK47. We have captured Rodin's Drinker - a conceptual statue by art terrorist Banksy. Is it art or is it kidnap?" A second series of images shows the kidnap taking place. The sculpture has a strip of gaffer tape across his eyes and mouth. It is loaded on to a van and transported to what looks like a warehouse. The final picture is blurred, but it seems to show a hand holding a gun to the statue." The Guardian (UK) 04/02/04

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Today's Art - What A Peculiar Lot Where is contemporary art going? Martin Gayford is confused: "Is there a trend in contemporary art? At the moment, it just seems to be getting more and more peculiar. This year's Turner Prize - won, you may recall, by a transvestite potter - might have seemed slightly outre. But, in comparison with the Beck's Futures Prize, currently on show at the ICA, the tame old Turner looks positively mainstream." The Telegraph (UK) 04/01/04

Art From 9/11 Dust Wins Prize "A handful of dust, gathered from the streets of New York in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, last night won the first £40,000 Artes Mundi prize for the Chinese artist Xu Bing." The Guardian (UK) 03/30/04

Radical Architecture Collective Grows Into Its Time The British radical architecture collective Archigram found little success back in the 1960s, and it wasn't until decades later that theyy were appreciated. "Perhaps the fascinating thing about Archigram is what seems to be an instinctive recognition that if those involved truly wanted to be radical, they needed to steer clear of actual building. So architects became writers and artists. Ideas were developed and then allowed to work their way into the intellectual consciousness." The Telegraph (UK) 03/30/04

Checkpoint Airport Art Wonder where those items confiscated from airline passengers at security checkpoints end up? An artist bought a few hundred pounds of the items and made art out of them. "In the massive Plexiglas case, wrapped in a heavy chain Maloney bought at Home Depot and hand-painted a rust color, are deer antlers, a tuning wrench for bongo drums still in its plastic case, his and her handcuffs, knitting needles, a decorative diaper pin, metal brushes, hair picks, a painted horseshoe, knives and forks, tweezers, meat thermometers and fishing hooks along with the lines and sinkers." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 03/27/04

Mark Morris - Of Dance And Music It's impossible to separate Mark Morris's choreography from music. "His extraordinary dance vocabulary is arguably matched only by his breadth of musical tastes. He began, in a way, in two different dance and musical worlds, simultaneously studying Spanish folk arts (after he saw a Jose Greco concert at age 8) and classical ballet. Thus began an eclecticism so vital to his eventual role as versatile post-modern experimentalist, though he, not surprisingly, rejects labels." Chicago Tribune 03/28/04

not quite so recent....

MY BODY MY ART: A number of artists are tapping into a vein of concern about what some see as runaway technology in medical science. "The debate's over what we do with our bodies - science is catalyzing these debates - but where they play them out are culturally, personally, and legally. The artwork becomes a corporate body to mimic what happens in reality." Wired 05/15/00

SCIENCE OF ART: The scientific community has discovered the arts world, investing in arts projects. The artists bring outside-the-box thinking with their projects. New York Times 02/03/00