Every week, we’ll recap the best comments we’ve received on Hyperallergic’s posts, whether that’s on the blogazine itself, on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook. Be sure to check in every Friday for new comments.
Michelangelo Pistoletti, “Venus of the Rags” (1967)
On Tumblr
On our LABS tumblelog, we really loved @lauramb’s interpretation of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Venus of the Rags” (1967). Turning the Arte Povera piece on its head, she writes:
All those clothes in her closet and she hasn’t got a thing to wear. I feel your pain ma’am.
On Twitter
Responding to our post measuring installation artists against their environmental impact, we had some great responses on Twitter. @ARTnewsmag summed it up,
Hey artists–your brilliant commodity critique cannot obscure your ginormous carbon footprint
@Rebeccaeilering added something we hadn’t yet considered,
I think artists today are leaving an even bigger carbon footprint cause of technology and mobility.
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at the Tate’s Turbine Hall presented a big controversy for this week, but Sara Lynch (@ihavesmallfeet) suggested a solution for the dust problem:
If they mixed clean sweep into seeds or periodically misted them with water the dust issue would be solved. #sillytate
In the article, I wrote that the Tate was at fault for not figuring this problem out earlier. @remaerdyaD rightly corrects me, pointing out, “isn’t Weiwei more literally to blame and not the Tate?”
The aftershocks of our own Powerless 20 (in response to Art Review’s art world Power 100) were IMMEDIATE and IMPASSIONED. @artbystander calls us out for ripping off William Powhida’s copyrighted list-making. @powhida replies,
I should never help you with your school work again.
In response to our inclusion of faux-art worlders in the list, @FakeDeitchAsst responded,
Awww…I made @Hyperallergic’s 20 Most Powerless People List. Thanks guys! #AsIfINeededAReminder
He launched off an avalanche of faux commentators, @FakeDeitch bit back, “How dare they put me in the same sentence as you!”
Then @fakegagosian followed up,
I’m gonna have Colen stab them @FakeJerrySaltz @FakeDeitchAsst @Hyperallergic @FakeDeitch Isn’t Hyperallergic the fake @artfagcity !!?!!
To all our dear readers: we actually are the fake @artfagcity. Consider yourselves duped. 😉
On the Blogazine
In response to my short, snarky piece on #hashtag overuse, Man Bartlett explained his own naming practices and pointed out some other arguments:
The # is an important signifier in the titles of my performances (starting formally with #Theseus in Jan ’10, then adopted as the template #24h_____). It immediately identifies the “performance” as an event that takes place, at least in part, online (and specifically using Twitter).
While I can’t control the glut, I’ll continue to use them as long as the signification is relevant.
Also, small but important distinction: Twitter doesn’t critique mainstream media, Twitter users do.
Star Wars Modern (aka John Powers) added another to our list of eight deadly artworks and explained the backstory behind the Richard Serra mishap:
You missed a Calder. In his book of interviews, The Portraits Speak, Chuck Close interviews Richard Serra and asks him about the Walker accident:
“Speaking of death and nastiness and Calder, not long after the accident with the piece that you were building in Minneapolis, where unfortunately a rigger was killed, there was a similar thing in Princeton where a Calder stabile fell on somebody and killed a worker. There was no press, no coverage, because a ‘happy’ piece of sculpture fell on the person… Don’t you think that people attacked you when that happened to you? If they couldn’t attack your work, they found another way to do it. I think what was done was outrageous and was an effort to kick you essentially while you were down. I think it was because the work seems aggressive, confrontational, scary, all those things, and if that work kills someone people have an immediate kind of—Well if your killed by a ‘happy’ Calder stabile, which implies that it is stable and not going to fall over are you any less dead?”
Serra’s answer is long and interesting – he credits the backlash against him in New York at the time as pushing him out of the studio and inaugurating his nomadic shipyard work. No where does he blame shoddy fabrication:
“Yeah I think people prefigured or prejudged what happened. And they didn’t know it was a rigger’s error. They thought that one of my pieces, given what I was doing, probably caused the accident, that I was up to no good, and they condemned me for it…”
We turned warrenthomasking’s comment on Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds mishap into the topic of a new post, further exploring how installation art impacts the environment.
Commenter Here is a Fantasy took our Powerless 20 and ran with it, seeing how many categories could be strung together into one ULTIMATELY POWERLESS art worlder:
I wonder if a combination of any of these things makes you more or less powerful because what if the handsome, yet precocious James Franco started blogging from Missoula while curating at a Starchitect-designed museum that showcased Chinese artists who were still hot, if not simmering, from earlier in the decade? Just saying, it might be a good career move.
It’s good to know that sometimes our commenters are funnier than we are.
