The battle of Helm’s Deep from the Two Towers would have had better OSH conditions than Art in the Dark
Grey Lynn Festival – 2 stars
So the Grey Lynn Festival happened last weekend. It’s a day where the good liberal people of Grey Lynn get together and mingle, but this year it seemed, well – depressed.
There wan’t a buzz, there was no vibe, the crushing victory by a corrupt right wing Government seemed to hang heavy on the good people of Auckland’s most socially progressive suburb. Children weren’t smiling, Dogs weren’t playing, milk soured for no reason.
The downer feeling was also exacerbated by what turned out to be a pretty average selection of venders.
One would think that with the explosion of ethical and creative businesses that we’ve seen spread throughout Auckland recently that this festival would pop and zip, but there were no Nice Blocks, no Bird on a Wire, no raw food venders, God, there wasn’t even Paella this year!
I have to admit that this years Waitakere Festival was way cooler and way more hip than it’s big Sister Grey Lynn event.
Art in the Dark – 3 stars
Art in the Dark proves how bored Aucklanders are that they will arrive in their thousands to see some lights in the dark. I usually love Art in the Dark, but this year it unfortunately became sandwiched in between a rainy night and the final of the Block meaning most punters all turned up on the same evening. This caused massive pile ups of people that made the entire event thrillingly dangerous.
I think ACC should be next years sponsor just for the irony and because people with broken ankles could fill out forms directly with them at their stall.
The battle of Helm’s Deep from the Two Towers would have had better OSH conditions than Art in the Dark. Parents who had been foolish enough to bring prams were discarded with all the dignity of burnt out Iraqi army vehicles fleeing from ISIS.
A great evening out if standing in line for an hour seeing nothing is your definition of a great night out.
I didn’t go to the Grey Lynn festival, again. Too impoverished. But think that if the Green elements of Grey Lynn are depressed they should influence their party away from stupidly standing a candidate to split the liberal vote, again. Jacinda could be their MP, and paella would reign. The Greens are great on the environment, but hell on elections.
Like everything else in this country Art is not immune. The Rise Of The ‘Curator’ and ‘group participation’ as well as many of the major patrons are actually Act members means that Art is well – pretty suppressed in this country. Yep now adays you need a bonafide Curator to ‘organize’ all art to make sure it is censored to the required quality of the time – and of course you need to have the right look and feel and academic dialogue going on with it. There are a few exceptions that pop up but how many radical ideas are you seeing on the walls of galleries and artist run spaces? Not many. Art in NZ is similar to Facebook and twitter – controlled one liners aimed for popularity with a lovely image a pinch of mystic a reinvented idea from past conceptual work and a grungy look of the artist, tied together with an ex artist now working in an institution as a curator who controls the look and feel and makes funding and running an exhibition so much easier for the government. All openly political work is discouraged except poverty and some identity work is ok as long as it is individualized and not too hard core. If you check out the YBA work from 10 -20 years ago it is now turned up in NZ as contemporary art. Yep there are some very good artists and ideas in and from NZ but we don’t see dissenting ideas in a mains steam context very often. They are de selected and marginalised early on.
I am an artist and see art in NZ fall into a few categories, fluff calling itself art or sausage factory so call contemporary institualised art, like looking into John Keys eyes dull, dead and totally lacking any soul. Or photo realism which all the plebs love and has taken over the so called contemporary galleries, which is totally devoid of imagination. And painted by using tracing tools so it isn’t even difficult (the plebs think it is high art) it isn’t much different than being good at ‘colour by numbers’ and it is all the same eg a boat on the water. It feels like art in NZ has gone backwards a hundred years. My favourite art site is Saatchiart.com it is AMAZING, and international, truely inspirational thank god for the Internet or I would have died of bordom looking at the repeatative gallery shows of the chosen fews artists works going around in circles in NZ. It is so commercial in NZ, it kills good artists dead as not enough people understand what they are looking at before the artist has to give up, and get a job, I see it getting worse and worse, we won’t have great modern art here soon and a public who just don’t ‘get’ it. Most of my work sells off shore so it won’t be seen here in the future either.
Sorry for spelling I have just up graded my IPad systems and it is crap now, I am sure it is making words up, eg, ‘Repetitive ‘ and it keeps locking up and shutting down, driving me mad. I wish I had left it how it was which was a lot better. Doesn’t help I have a kitten jumping on the iPad.
I’m with Kate, most of my stuff is sold overseas and highly unlikely to ever be heard here. Ironic really as It’s NZ nature based work.
The good liberal people of Grey Lynn are probably selling up or being priced out by the good conservative people formerly of the eastern suburbs. So it’ll probably slowly turn into the Beigeuera of the West.
Hmmmmm……sounds like they ran out of coffee for the weekend?
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