omfg Pratt

I’m definitely going to go around Pratt and take pictures of those atrocious placards that accompany some of the art installed throughout their campus/sculpture park. The school offers a virtual-tour of the park, but it doesn’t include the text from the placards (with good reason). My biggest concerns are as follows:

• Not all of the works have placards
• There are multiple physical & stylistic formats for the placards
• There are copious, glaring, and confusing grammatical errors on the placards
• The artist’s name, work title, year of make, and artist’s statement are unclear
• The artist’s statements are horrendously written

You’d think that an institution dedicated to higher-learning and the arts would have taken strides to not have so many glaringly poor examples of shitty, lazy copy prominently—sometimes permanently—on display throughout their campus. Who’s is charge of these things? What’s the protocol for putting these placards up? In truth, I’d prefer there to be no placards than a handful of haphazardly written/installed ones. Maybe an easy to edit/update paper map would be a better solution, made available at certain campus locations (i.e. the library, that bastion of literacy)?

We all make typos and poopy grammar, but shouldn’t a university hold itself to somewhat higher standards? Again, if these were labels for a student show or posters or something less conspicuous/ubiquitous than etched, steel placards dotting the campus-scape, I wouldn’t be as full of righteous nerd-ire. The school's site claims that theirs is the largest sculpture park in New York City—shouldn’t that be all the more reason for things to be a bit more together?

Gripes aside, I love Pratt’s campus. I love that they have a campus at all (I went to Parsons, where you are often required to race through traffic to make it to your next class). For Pratt to support the display of various sculptures by various artists is a really keen thing, even if the placards make me furious (some of the sculptures do, too). But I really don’t understand how something so wrong and obvious could be overlooked—and maintained—by an arts-based university that seems to put so much focus (and money) into grooming their gated, guarded ivory towers?

The Artist is Freaky

I saw Jeff Koons leering with his creepy/friendly/aggressive visage from a poster in Kiehl's storefront display. I caught the word "acai" and the general motifs that advertisements use to connote health, "green"-ness, sustainability, blah blah blah. Jeff Koons is everywhere again. He's curating all over the place. He'll curate on your face. He designed some vertiginous automobile graphics and permitted his faceless metallic bunny to multiply on Google Chrome.

I haven't seen Antony Gormley's suicidal sentinels, but I did see Marina Abramovic being present. She looked like a breathing wax figure of a prophet. Everyone I saw who sat to experience a Gelfling dreamfast with her made me angry. All it did was prove that Marina is a billion times more hardcore than you and that she will eat your soul with her mind. I'm seeing that many people are posting pictures of themselves engaged in a Gelfling dreamfast with Marina. These pictures remind me of the $5 pictures they try to sell you after you ride a rollercoaster. It would be awesome if someone were to set up a little parasite business taking pictures of people sitting with Marina and try to sell them to the sitters for $5 a pop. Or the MoMA could make some extra cash selling prints from their live webcam. Instead, they've foolishly provided a photostream capturing each and everyone who has lost to the staring-contest queen.