Today on disturbing and bizarre...

[hafital]

Solid Gold Moss Statue Revealed.

This has been in the UK news all week (what can I say, I'm starving for stimuli at work, so I troll bbc.com) and I just CANNOT get over it.

A 50kg solid gold statue of model Kate Moss has been unveiled at the British Museum, in London.

'Ideal beauty

Comments

[unovis]

At the British Museum?
That's awful.

ETA: Oh, I see. It's not as horrible, explained by the artist in the article. The "Aphrodite of our times" is nonsense. I didn't realize the BM collected contemporary art, either. Big mistake.

[hafital]

I wonder what his other "Alison Lapper Pregnant" statue looks like. And from lower down in the article: Meanwhile, The National Portrait Gallery has launched a public appeal to raise £200,000 for Marc Quinn's self-portrait head cast made from frozen blood.

...

I mean, I admittedly am not up on the art world, particularly the modern art world, but that seems extreme.

[unovis]

I can understand Quinn's work, but I don't really enjoy looking at most of it. I don't like most of the work of the "Young British Artists" school. I admire what he did with the Alison Lapper sculpture, relevant to her life and her own work, more than the Kate Moss one (info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alison_Lapper... )

[hafital]

:D That was fascinating. And see, I totally need to view modern art with someone who knows art or I won't get it. Obviously you can deconstruct art the same as a story, but I lack the tools for this.

[unovis]

I don't really know what I'm talking about, as I find out the more I read about this. The original Sphinx was white-painted bronze, not marble. The sculptor has focused on Kate Moss as his own ideal of beauty, not society's. I still think that the open-crotch poses aren't meant to signal sexual invitation, but again, it's just an opinion -- you can at least see some other angles and sculptures here:
http://www.supertouchart.com/2008/08/29/newsmarc-quinn-to-unveil-gold-kate-moss-sphinx-sculpture/

The one that looks flayed is based on a convention in Buddhist sculptures.