Friday, March 15, 2013

Observations on Art 3.15

Diana Thater - Day For Night
Armory Week usually brings about a kind of art overload, if that is possible, but there is always something I absolutely love. This year it was a series of videos by artist Diana Thater at the David Zwirner booth. To make the videos Thater said she "placed the flowers on a mirror that reflected the bright blue Los Angeles sky above and filmed them from above on a crane using a day for night filter, which movie directors use to make scenes shot in the day look like they occur at night, and had a rain machine pump rain between the camera and the flowers." The videos were played on the highest of hi-tech screens and are just a stunning shade of blue.

Not long after I mentioned that I have no use for Pinterest I read an article on ArtInfo that listed the ten best art related accounts to follow. Needless to say I'm finding myself addicted to what you could call art porn but I have yet to 'pin' a single thing. That lack of pinning brings to mind a question, how did I get seven followers? If you use Pinterest the article is a good place to start but I would add The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre both of which have awesome boards, or maybe I'm just a snob at times.

A quote I posted on tumblr about a month ago has well over 5,000 reposts now. The quote is by Vladimir Nabokov and I'm sure its popularity is saying something about the world we live in but at the moment I don't feel like dwelling on it. This is the quote, "Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."

Speaking of quotes, and possibly in some way related to the above paragraph, today is March 15th, The Ides of March. This would be the day Julius Caesar was assassinated in the year 44 BC. A seer had warned Caesar that harm would come to him no later than the Ides of March. While going to the Theatre of Pompey that day (eerie shades of Lincoln here) Caesar passed the same person and supposedly joked, "The ides of March have come," meaning he was still alive. The seer answered back, "Aye, but not gone." Four years later Octavian executed 300 Roman Senators on the anniversary of Caesar's death.

I have no idea why I think that is important but yet I do. I think it has something to do with the ignorance of  the currently be held CPAC and what people will think of us 2,000 years from now, that is if there are people. It can't be good.

As William Shakespeare wrote simply in Julius Caesar, "beware the Ides of March." I would stay away from theatres too.