Wednesday 28 May 2008

Psycho Buildings

Hayward Gallery - Psycho Building! (2008)An "art" exhibition called Psycho Buildings opens today at the Hayward Gallery in London. To mark its 40th anniversary the Hayward invited 10 wannabe architects from around the world to inflict "art" installations on the gallery. These include a boating pool, a transparent inflatable dome, a "disorientating passageway", a basement staircase created from a vibrant red semi-translucent fabric.... Need I go on? Clearly this piffle is designed to please mindless yuppies who know nothing about art and who crave fairground sensation, the same breed of twerps who injured themselves on Tate Modern's helter-skelter (CLICK). £10 for this tosh? You've got to be joking.

2 Comments:

At 29/5/08, Anonymous Anonymous said...

i liked it. do you hate all installation art?

 
At 30/5/08, Blogger Unknown said...

I'm glad you enjoyed it.

It's not that I hate installation art; what I hate is the pretension of calling what is basically a fairground attraction - such as a ghost train or a helter-skelter - "art", raising it to a level it doesn't deserve.

Years ago I visited an art installation in the Whitechapel Gallery which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was a "field" of gigantic wheat lit by powerful flood lamps that gave you the feeling you were a field mouse walking through a sunlit field on a summer's day. In the centre of the field stood a giant flower that you could enter and climb to see the "field" from above. It was fun, a novelty and an enjoyable experience, but I wouldn't call it "art". In fact I wouldn't even call it high-grade "craft"; it was too tacky for that. It was a fairground-style novelty, nothing more.

I suspect a lot more art and craft goes into those theme-park rides at places like Disneyland than ever goes into installation art.

 

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