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ARTCAT



A Cheap Publicity Stunt

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council: Redhead Gallery
125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor, 212-219-9401
Tribeca / Downtown
November 18 - December 22, 2005
Reception: Friday, November 18, 6 - 9 PM
Web Site


Perhaps you saw Robert Smithson’s Floating Island, a barge covered in trees circling round Manhattan Island the last week of September. Perhaps you saw Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, the saffron structures cast around Central Park for the first half of March.

This is public art today: temporary and well-publicized. Diane Shamash from Minetta Brook, the organization that co-sponsored Floating Island with the Whitney, referred to the park on a barge as “the anti-gates” because it cost a mere $200,000 as compared to The Gates, which cost a purported $23 million. Today, the poles have changed. Doing it on the cheap means the salary of a Supreme Court Justice.

Accordingly, REDHEAD will be printing some posters and serving some beer.

But for what? For a project with no title by artists no one knows. What project? A Gate chasing Floating Island. These unnamed artists bolted a replica Gate to a small boat with an outboard motor, shoved off from DUMBO, and chased after Floating Island.

And it seemed like, for a moment, the public and public art understood each other. Blogger commentary, the New York Times, New York Magazine: a collective sigh of relief from the pretensions that accompany public art with too much advertising.

From November 18th through December 22, the boat itself, with its makeshift saffron sail, will be on display as well as a film that documents the boat’s adventure and speaks back to all the attention. Is public art still possible? Can a cheap stunt pack a punch? Does art make enough room to laugh at itself? Yes. When money steps aside and lets the work do the talking.

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