March 21, 2004

"The Weather Project" I like this Olafur Eliasson installation in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern. The NYT writes:
An instant cult site of mood-altering atmospherics, both gloomy and eye-popping, "The Weather Project" consists of a fake sun (yellow lights behind a huge semicircular screen, below a mirrored ceiling) and pumped-in mist. ...

Thrilled but circumspect about the reaction, he is by temperament a skeptical Scandinavian type. Half Danish, half Icelandic, he is not given to expressions of simple contentment, not with a stranger anyway. "I am trying to maintain in my mind an open discourse about its qualities of consumerism and spectacle," he says. "I would like to think that the spectator became the center of this piece, that the project twisted the Tate so the people who came to visit were what the art was about." ...

Previously, he has erected a fake sun, about 41 yards in diameter, like a billboard, on the skyline in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He designed a waterfall that flowed upward. He dyed various rivers in Europe and America green (eco-friendly dye, naturally)....
Hey, wait a minute. I think Chicago got there first.

A side note: why does the Times deal enthusiastically in ethnic stereotypes when the group in question is Nordic? (Like this one, about the "famously silent, stoic Finns.")

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