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Thursday, April 19, 2012

But is it Art?

Sculptural works, temporary or permanent, are fixtures of the Manhattan landscape...this one, at the South end of Central Park, looks to me just like a pile of truck tire inner tubes...

When I show people pictures like this on Facebook, they usually jokingly ask " But is it art?" I believe we have to be pretty flexible about what we accept as art-- the question more often being " Is it good art or bad art?"

I could never stand Picasso's "Guernica" painting when I was young ( I see more merit to it now) and of course Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Can paintings--which many people dismissed as a mere trendy phenomenon when he first unveiled them-- are now pretty much accepted and people will pay a lot of money for them ( but then, when people start treating art mostly as an investment, it is all speculative play at work, anyway).

There are many sculptures around in Midtown that leave me cold and others that have grown on me with time...I doubt I will ever think that much of this work, though. Maybe if I and it are still around in another 20 years, I would say differently...

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