banana

now i may have mentioned this in the past but i am an art fan - there are few things i like more than wandering around an art gallery stroking my goatee and humming to myself (or trilling if you happen to be a doc savage fan) and contemplating the meaning of the work in question. but i am the first to admit that i am firmly in the camp of i-don't-know-much-about-art-but-i-know-what-i-likers. to me for art to work it has to move me, it has to have that wow factor that makes me stop stare and want to come back to it, i want to know that the artist has put something of themselves into the work.
hell i am not even sure i need to understand what the artist is trying to get at. i just have to like it.
so i can enjoy the works of damien hirst, gillian wearing, rothko, jackson pollock, mapplethorpe and many more. it's why i go looking in galleries to discover more artists and more art to go oooh aaah over (paul noble's work at the whitechapel is among my current wow work). but even i know when someone is taking piss.
the large pile of bananas that were displayed in trafalgar, 30,000 of them. even without seeing them ( i was at work while this installation was erected and dismantled) i can believe it would look spectacular and impressive but that doesn't make it art. doesn't even make it close to art, it just makes it a big pile of something. this is what the artist, doug fishbone, had to say about it
"A lot of people have asked me what it means but I'm stepping back. I want this to involve the audience. It's such a big physical presence and changes so much in different contexts that I cannot honestly say any more whether it still has its original meaning,"
i am with brian sewell who saw it as being an attention grabbing scam.
you can read about this here.
the independent this thursday (7th of october) had an interview with martin creed, he has a new show on in london starting this week for the rest of the month, part of the interview was about how he had not decided what is to be shown at the show yet. creed has won the turner prize in 2001 with Work No. 227, the lights going on and off - which was simply the light going on and then off in a room. heavy stuff man.
creed is lumped in with people such as hirst and emin as part of the young british artist movement. although creed argues this is not the case as he is not a conceptual artist - he argues he makes things and not ideas.
which is all well and good but when you consider some of his work includes just pressing blutac onto the wall, creating an inch block of packing tape and sticking that to the wall. you have to wonder if creed is not an artist but more of a stand up comic.
go here for more about creed.

i shall be going to the show and i will let you know what i think. (hey that's worth the return trip alone and you know it!)
i can only hope i don't get kicked out of the gallery because i am laughing too much - i will tell them i am living with and not laughing at...... lets hope i just like the art.