This was a wise bit of advice/injection of wit by an old high school mentor of mine regarding art. It was something that saved a final project from the depths hell, and perhaps something someone out here took to heart and turned into their modus operandi.
China has had the luxury to produce and manufacture art on a scale perhaps never seen in human history before. I would wager that nearly every piece of public art you've seen in a Best Western or Airport Hilton is a replication or poor original mass produced in artist factories and sent to their humble destinations to draw attention away from decaying furniture and browning walls. This extremely intimate relation with the world's art (both great and horrible) is evidenced in an art village here where one can purchase a hand painted Manet, and gleaming Mona Lisa, and the one of whoever it was painted Napoleon on his fantastic steed. I would further wager that it is this very intimacy that allows the government to quite literally vomit public art all over SZ in a last-second effort to give this soulless city a hint of class, of artistic flare, and I must admit that at every turn, their hidden intentions are glaringly obvious.
I will take a bit of down time this week and capture as much of it as I can on my Leica M9 (see: cellphone camera), and post it here for you to yay or nay in concert with me. I have never really held a high opinion of public art in general, and I will gladly admit my artistic eye and background is not nearly distinguished enough to critique anything above my own humble levels of ability, but really, the soulless way the art was put up made me sad.
We'll see how it is received, certainly a lot of it is big, painted red, and to give the Chinese-lily-gild: covered in string LED's
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