So what is art? We all know paintings are art. Literature is considered art. Music is art. We all have opinions about the quality of anything we call art, but what about those things which are labelled as art, and are created by people who call themselves artists, but which many can't agree is even art to begin with?
Alaska-based, Milanese born artist Paola Pivi is flying goldfish to New Zealand on a private plane for 100 people to look at. A film of the flight and the landing will then be played in a central city park for mass consumption. Aside from the pilots and flight crew, the only other passengers will be the artist and her assistants. The exhibition will be titled I Wish I Am Fish.
Me, I wish I could make stuff like this up, but it's all true. Pivi said her project is a "performance" where at least two fish will be flown from Sydney to Auckland as passengers. Yes, that's right, they'll have their own seats. Not sure if they'll have food service. It's good to know they'll be able to keep each other company.
The plane will land at a private hanger at Auckland Airport. The landing will be the end of the performance, which will be documented on film and relayed on a big screen in Auckland's Freyberg Square. The artist is funding the majority of the project, which is understood to be costing tens of thousands of dollars.
So. Is this art? Performance Art? A stunt? It's all in the eye of the beholder, is it not? Pivi, who splits her time between Milan and Alaska, gained acclaim for her 2003 photo of a donkey floating on a small boat and in 2007 for a leopard walking across 3,000 cappuccino cups.
She is, of course the latest in a long line of controversial artists. The last time I recall anything like this in New Zealand was the Cardrona Bra Fence, which was a controversial tourist attraction in Central Otago, where passers-by started to add bras to a rural fence, with the fence eventually growing into a famous tourist attraction with hundreds of individual bras. That may or may not have been inspired by the work of the artist Christo, with his fabric wrapped buildings and the infamous fence of sheets. He's probably one of the better known controversial artists.
Not, however, as controversial as a photograph by American photographer Andres Serrano. You may have forgotten the name, but you will almost certainly remember the piece, and the resulting uproar in America. The piece caused a scandal when it was exhibited in 1989, with detractors, including United States Senators Al D'Amato and Jesse Helms, outraged that Serrano received $15,000 from the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Arts for the work. The work is question was title Piss Christ. It was a plastic crucifix submerged in the artists urine..jpg)
Sister Wendy Beckett, an art critic and Catholic nun, stated in a television interview with Bill Moyers that she regarded the work as not blasphemous but a statement on "what we have done to Christ" - that is, the way contemporary society has come to regard Christ and the values he represents.
Such is the nature, then, of art. Would it be as valuable if it didn't incite strong emotion? Isn't that what art should do? To get back to my original question, what is art? Who decides? As a storyteller and a photographer, I wouldn't consider my work of any real value if it didn't incite emotion and raise questions in the mind of the beholder. Is that which is meant to deliberately provoke any less worthy of the title "art", than something which is simply put forward for no particular reason?
I'd love to know what you think.
