THE CLOTH IS INVISIBLE!- Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

 Last year, I wrote about the giant eyeball sculpture  that was installed on Van Buren Street in downtown Chicago and paid for by the Chicago Loop Alliance.  Trying to be clever, I said, “Eye don’t think it is art” and wrote, “Because everyone’s taste is different, we all have our own definition of what art is.  We have dissimilar feelings about what we appreciate or respond to.”  I am now apologizing for that blog because the latest installation is really not art, it is just a billboard!

The “art” is described as a “bold six-story mural” by Art Daily, but it is a billboard!  Look at it!  If it had the Nike logo on it, it would be a billboard on the side of the Stevens Building on North State Street!  I feel like the little boy at the end of the story, “The Emperor‘s New Clothes,” who pointed out that the emperor was really naked.  Doesn’t everybody else see that the “art” in this instance is invisible? 

At the web site http://www.askart.com/, the artist Kay Rosen is described as, “ A word artist, she creates sign-like enamel paintings often having to do with gender politics and power. She enjoys playing with language as though it is art, and it is said that her work is always flashy and contentious."  If one uses the definition of “contentious” as “arguable,” then I argue that this is not art!

(another Kay Rosen piece of "art")

Art in America magazine calls her a “text-based conceptualist.” I agree the message, “Go Do Good,” is an excellent theory to communicate, but it is not art-- it is an expression of language.

Nike has used the slogan “Just Do It,” since 1988, and pays millions of dollars a year to advertise that phrase. The company has been telling the world to “do it,” for 23 years! But in Chicago, instead, we pay for “Go Do Good?”  The Chicago Loop Alliance could have gotten Nike to finance the “art” but just putting the famous “swoosh” on it.

The cloth of the emperor’s clothes was said to have a special capability of being invisible to anyone who was stupid, I guess this card-carrying Mensan is stupid, because the art is invisible to me.