But is she art?

[Gob]

For most students, there is nothing more stressful than a final exam.



But now imagine that to pass the exam, you have to be naked in a candlelit classroom. Not only in front of your whole class, but also in front of your professor. At the University of California, San Diego, this naked final exam is in fact a course requirement for a class in the visual arts department. But nudity isn't enough for the students of the upper-level course, as they must also perform 'a gesture that traces, outlines or speaks about your 'erotic self(s)', according to the course syllabus.

A disgusted mother has spoken out against the requirement on local ABC News affiliate, KGTV, after her daughter told her of the final exam. The mother insists that the requirement is not made clear at the start of the course, and called it a 'perversion'. She added that the exam - during which all the students and the male professor strip naked in a candlelit classroom - made her 'sick to her stomach'. But professor Ricardo Dominguez insists that he has not had any complaints in the 11 years he has taught the course.

'It's the standard canvas for performance art and body art,' Dominguez told local ABC News affiliate KGTV.

'It is all very controlled... If they are uncomfortable with this gesture, they should not take the class.' According to the course description on the faculty website, students 'use autobiography, dream, confession, fantasy or other means to invent one's self in a new way, or to evoke the variety of selves in our imagination'. It continues: 'The course experiments with an explores the rich possibilities available to the contemporary artist in his or her own persona'.

[BoSoxGal]

I don't see anything outrageous about the requirement itself, but not providing the information to students upon enrollment so that they could withdraw and choose another course if they so desired is definitely poor form. I should think any student who wasn't comfortable with that exam requirement would have a possible cause of action against the university.

[Big RR]

This looks like helicopter parenting to the extreme; it appears to be an advanced level class, so the young woman who complained (if she did) is probably at least 20 or 21, and mommy is fighting her battle? Will she do the same one day when here dear daughter doesn't get the job she wanted, or a raise, or ... ?

[Sue U]

People who get bent out of shape over nudity and eroticism probably shouldn't have anything to do with art; it can only have bad results all around.

[wesw]

I don t have any thing against nudity in art, but a class of naked girls has to be hard job for the teacher....

some people think Jackson Pollack was an artist, suckers....

....and who was it that hung the gossamer crap in central park? he was a right carrot too....

[Guinevere]

Do you mean The Gates, by Christo?






Just curious if you actually experienced the art installation, or just saw photographs. I took my older nephew who was a baby at the time, and we loved it.



This:




was just installed in Boston, and its beautiful. And an engineering marvel, too.


https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/s ... story.html

Is it a giant jellyfish? A spaceship? An outsized butterfly net?

Whatever it is, Brookline artist Janet Echelman’s light-as-air sculpture, which turned heads as it soared over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway on Sunday morning, took a village to raise.

Arriving in the wee hours of the morning, crews closed roads to make way for the project’s six cranes. With roughly 50 workers on site, the sculpture — a vast net of rusty orange, magenta, and green hues that will float above the Greenway until October — emerged from an impossibly small wooden crate, hoisted, inch by inch and crane by crane, to span roughly half an acre in the air.

It was a colossal choreography of man and machine, as cranes lifted one portion of the net, then another, only to hand them off to workers who hand-winched them to buildings around the Greenway, fastening them tight.

But if hoisting the sculpture resembled what organizers called a “crane ballet,” its planning and design were equally intricate — a creative collaboration between Echelman, structural engineers, software developers, lighting specialists, building contractors, political officials, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway Conservancy, owners of nearby property, and more.

“It’s a bit of a coming-out party for public art on the Greenway,” said Conservancy executive director Jesse Brackenbury.

It is also a work of collective imagination. “I ask what is possible, and then the engineers tell me this is possible, and within that I start to design,” said Echelman, 49, who has constructed similar aerial sculptures around the world.

In Boston, Echelman is exploring a contrast between the ephemeral and the permanent: “I started thinking about the way Boston ambitiously reshaped its environment,” she explained. The sculpture’s three voids are meant to evoke three hills that once dominated Boston’s landscape but were razed to create landfill. Similarly, its colored bands are intended to recall the elevated highway that defined the Greenway space before the Big Dig banished it below ground.

[wesw]

yeah, that's the one guin. you really liked that? I get that the baby liked it and that you liked him being happy, but did you (italics) really like it?

I did not see it in person, I only saw a long form story about it on the telly somewhere and coverage of it in the news.

the installation just mars the beauty of the park in my view.

ETA
wow. the thing in boston certainly seems like art to me. now that's some right pretty gossamer crap there that is....

something that beautiful and elegant and fragile in the middle of the city is breath taking. definitely art.

kinda like central park, without the red sheets....

just my view...

[Guinevere]

I did *really* like it. It was striking but also blended into the contours of the park. It made me smile.

But that's just my view.

[wesw]

[oldr_n_wsr]

That thing in Boston is cool and took artistic talent to create. (IMHO)
The Central Park gates was not and did not. (IMNSHO)

[Big RR]

Guin--I saw the exhibit in central park and didn't care for it at all. A bunch of fiberglass curtains on PVC piping is just silly IMHO, and I didn't see it blending into the park (more like sticking out like a sore thumb. But then this guy also created the running fence and covered a harbor in florida with pink plastic. To me it stinks more of hucksterism than art, but to each his or her own.

But I do give art a wide berth, so if you enjoyed/were moved by it, perhaps it is art.