Link number one is Google’s latest trick. Google Street View allows you take street level tours of five major American cities. It’s creepy and helpful and mesmerizing and a technological wonder. My only complaint is that there’s no Atlanta. I don’t know how long it will take them to add new cities, but for now I’ll visit the apartments of friends in New York.
Link number two is really two links. In my note to remind about posting this I wrote, “Artist has art down.” followed by the link to a Studio 360 interview with the artist Richard Serra. He makes these incredible, incredibly large, sculptures. His largest works allow you to literally walk around inside them, experiencing the curves and paths and light and sounds of giant pieces of metal. At one point in the excellent piece Serra says of being inside one of the sculptures, “The content and subject matter is your experience, not the depicted object of the representation….This is your experience unmediated in relation to your walking. You don’t have to know anything about anything. You don’t have know anything about sculpture; you don’t have to know anything.” Serra has hit on just what I think is most precious about art. If I were a better writer, this blog would be more about stuff I do than stuff I think and observe. That is to say, if I were a better artist, I could offer you, the reader, more experience than content. Serra has a show at MOMA. I wish I could go, but all I can do is encourage any of you in New York to check it out.
