Gallery Beat

Obsessed By Ophelia 26 x 14 x 8 Blown and Cast Glass , Video

Inside a man holds a video screen with the image of a dreaming Ophelia. He is surrounded by stacks of books, a crown, a sacred heart and a broken heart sewn back together. The finial is of a straight jacket.

Images: Tim Tate Guardians Of The Necropolis 36 x 18 x 18 Cast Glass, Wood, Video

The finial on this piece is of 3 Alligator Men. One holds the Book of the Dead, one holds a lotus flower, one a plum bob. Inside stand 2 large figures, back to back watching over each other. The both hold a video. One video is of flying through night time clouds...one is of billowing curtains in front of a darkened entrance. They are surrounded by Crocodile Women, canopic jars, sarcophagi and Egyptian sculptures. This piece protects the owner from death. She Goes Walking After Midnight, 14 x 10 x 3 Glass, Video The View From afar 18 x 10 x 10 Glass,Video

Art or Entertainment?

As the Covidian Age begins (to the dismay of newspaper editors all over New York and LA) to show signs of slowing down, I got to think about art stuff that I originally thought about decades ago, whenever some shiny “new” thing popped into the art scene.

Remember when everyone was doing “art videos” as the new thing?

I don’t hide the fact that most art videos (which I have sometimes called artists’ home movies) left me pretty ambivalent, especially as I try to view them as art, rather than entertainment.

In the nearly 70 or 80-year history of artists’ home movies, I can probably count in one hand the number of them that I would even remotely consider as something more than a low budget attempt at making a film, and most of those on that list start before the VCR was invented.

And even after all these years, no one has ever surpassed Salvador Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou.” And for the really “artsy” ones, Ana Mendieta’s still rule.

Nonetheless, it is a fact that most of the voices in the art world that count and weighin a lot more importantly than mine, once upon a time a decade or two ago viewed video (pun intended) as the leading edge for creativity in the modern dialogue of the visual arts (even though the genre was then in its 7th decade).

Witness the video overloads in the Whitney Biennial lists of the 2010s for example.

History lesson for anyone born after 1980 or so: Before