Deborah Fisher

Meadow Flow

Hey if you haven't made it over to 21st Century Plowshare yet, what are you waiting for?

Bed Stuy Meadow is going to be realized this April. There are almost seventy volunteers, I've raised almost a third of the project's budget, you too can be a part of it!

Pass the word along to everyone--it's a local project with a global scope!

Irrelevance

David Frum's take on the Republican Party brought a lot of my thoughts about being an artist right now into focus.

I still like art the way Frum still likes being a conservative. But man! This is not the usual Armory Show Dyspepsia. The context art sits in feels as selfish and irrelevant and self-segregating as Frum's Landscape of Dittoheads.

The Irrational Power of Public Sculpture

The sculpture that killed Luis Jimenez (a part-time instructor at my undergraduate alma mater and very part-time mentor of yours truly) is either miserably failing the Battle For Appropriateness In Context that every public sculpture faces, or it's got its finger directly on the pulse of how horrifying it is to fly in and out of the Denver Airport.

(That thing's eyes actually blaze red at night! How's that for a cheery Bon Voyage?)

Either way, it's good when sculptures prompt facebook campaigns--art doesn't have to be liked to do its job. Rachel Hultin, who began the anti-Blue Mustang crusade by, delightfully and inexplicably, asking haters to pen original haiku of disgust, is now crusading for an education campaign instead:

“In the process of being personally attacked through e-mail, and through learning more about the piece, I’ve shifted gears from, ‘I don’t think it’s appropriate,’ to ‘Let’s try and understand it...’

Is there something to understand? I think that the really interesting thing to understand is right there in the pages and pages of facebooked haiku.

The evolving response is the gift, and its very inappropriateness is the delivery system. Bravo, Luis Jimenez!