Sunday, November 13, 2005


.

.

WHEN IS IT
ART
?

This piece of total-garbage-non-art cleverly titled CUBI XXVIII in an attempt to give it some belated mystery, sold for $23.8 million dollars, this week. The New York Times, always ready to support extreme incompetence, described it as ".....an elegantly composed melding of boxes and columns."

Good art.....good design......they provide a visual center of gravity from which our eyes can safely wander to look at other parts of the work while always returning to rest at that center of gravity. This CUBI-thing does not contain such a center. It forces you to see all of its disconnected, meaningless parts at incredible speed............over and over and over........never being able to rest. But that's only a tiny source of its failure, which is so monumental, that there's no point in even describing it any further.

Fabricating works of art out of steel, is a conscious choice on the part of their creators. Yet most of such works are nothing but found pieces welded together at random, signifying nothing other than a vacuous mind at work. If you feed the words "steel sculpture" into the Google Images Search, you'll find thousands of ugly, uncontrolled and undesigned pieces of junk like this 24-million-dollar CUBI-TRASH that has an actual value of perhaps $23.80.

Perhaps that's why, in comparison, the carefully-conceived works of Anish Kapoor and Richard Serra stand out as treasures?

Kapoor's polished steel shapes are perfectly formed, truly unique, and aestetically pleasing, while

Serra celebrates the innate strength of steel, by shaping his sculptures so they can stand on their own in a display of clean and powerful curves.

Sorry that I made you click to another site in order to see the CUBI..........I just couldn't stand to have it permanently displayed on my blog.

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