Ia Ia Chihuly Fhtagn!
"I keep forgetting the name," said J as we headed to the Chihuly exhibition at the De Young museum, "and thinking Cthulhu."
For the rest of the afternoon, we kept interpreting the exhibition - which was spectacular - through an eldritch lens. I was already familiar with Chihuly's bulbous and tendrilly chandeliers and sculptures. But this was even better. The huge organic shapes were perfectly Lovecraftian, if Cthulhu and his colleagues were represented in brilliantly colored glass.
I thought it was just us, but it's not: Googling Cthulhu Chihuly got me over 500 hits.
In other Chihuly-related news: Kenneth Baker, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, declared that Chihuly's work is Not Art, and used it to swipe at John Buchanan of the De Young Museum. Aside from the art-politics angle, Baker's objection was that the exhibition is intellectually empty, and Chihuly's work is not art because it contains no linkages to the work of other major artists: "The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property."
Well, maybe. The history of art is also the history of eminent critics reviling works that made statements they failed to understand, perhaps precisely because they reflected a discontinuity in artistic tradition. Perhaps Baker's critique is an indicator that Chihuly's work has arrived, not only as a spectacle, but as art. If Baker is eminent enough to count.
At the time I wrote this (3 Aug 08) there were nearly 130 comments, most of them disagreeing with Baker. He followed it with another article, defending his criticism. That got a similar number of comments.
(And maybe he's trying to trace the wrong linkages, anyway. Maybe he should think in terms of Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and look for references to contemporary culture and imagery instead of sterile arguments about art vs craft - which was the excessively tired direction some of the discussion eventually took.)
For the rest of the afternoon, we kept interpreting the exhibition - which was spectacular - through an eldritch lens. I was already familiar with Chihuly's bulbous and tendrilly chandeliers and sculptures. But this was even better. The huge organic shapes were perfectly Lovecraftian, if Cthulhu and his colleagues were represented in brilliantly colored glass.
I thought it was just us, but it's not: Googling Cthulhu Chihuly got me over 500 hits.
In other Chihuly-related news: Kenneth Baker, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, declared that Chihuly's work is Not Art, and used it to swipe at John Buchanan of the De Young Museum. Aside from the art-politics angle, Baker's objection was that the exhibition is intellectually empty, and Chihuly's work is not art because it contains no linkages to the work of other major artists: "The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property."
Well, maybe. The history of art is also the history of eminent critics reviling works that made statements they failed to understand, perhaps precisely because they reflected a discontinuity in artistic tradition. Perhaps Baker's critique is an indicator that Chihuly's work has arrived, not only as a spectacle, but as art. If Baker is eminent enough to count.
At the time I wrote this (3 Aug 08) there were nearly 130 comments, most of them disagreeing with Baker. He followed it with another article, defending his criticism. That got a similar number of comments.
(And maybe he's trying to trace the wrong linkages, anyway. Maybe he should think in terms of Cthulhu and the Flying Spaghetti Monster and look for references to contemporary culture and imagery instead of sterile arguments about art vs craft - which was the excessively tired direction some of the discussion eventually took.)
