How do curatorial initiatives in public spaces balance the critical pursuit of art and the professional ethics of the exhibition context? What are the pros and cons of conducting attention-grabbing guerrilla campaigns versus infiltrating... more
How do curatorial initiatives in public spaces balance the critical pursuit of art and the professional ethics of the exhibition context? What are the pros and cons of conducting attention-grabbing guerrilla campaigns versus infiltrating politically sensitive public arenas with long-term initiatives? What happens when corporate sponsors of art become trapped in the battlefield of art-fueled media controversy? This article expands on such inquiries by analyzing the collision of two artistic urban interventions, Open Sky Project and the Countdown Machine campaign—a collision that took place within the delicate political context of Hong Kong in 2016.
Applying the principle of “critical fusion” of fiction and reality to the media scape of the city would be to rethink the B2C dominant scheme and try to revive the interlocking of P2p and p2P attention flows. Applied to an interpersonal... more
Applying the principle of “critical fusion” of fiction and reality to the media scape of the city would be to rethink the B2C dominant scheme and try to revive the interlocking of P2p and p2P attention flows. Applied to an interpersonal dimension, the P2p and p2P flows conveniently merge into what could or even should become citizen relations ‘H2H’, that is, Human to Human. One could say that critical fusion is a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk (Trahndorff, 1827) perfected by the Bauhaus and le Corbusier (Wittick, 1977), but with a perfectly assumed social perspective. Instead of the design of stimuli it would make sense to look back at the renaissance artist and design an environment that will serve as a sense-making tool for the world and the relationships within it. Jean-Luc Nancy in a recent interview, presented the role of the artist as making sense beyond meaning. And we shouldn’t forget that social engagement doesn’t mean trying to say by other means what words express perfectly. What we understand is that we should expect more from art. Nancy added: “the role of the artist is to help us to see that after the mist, there is mist. At least it is not fog” (2016). And this makes even more sense in the city.
