State of the Art

Santa Barbara hosts an outdoor sculpture exhibition on State Street every year, aptly titled "The State of the Art Gallery." I attended the opening a couple of weeks ago on a brilliant late summer afternoon. You can read more about it at http://www.sbartscommission.org/public.html

One of the pieces was created by my sculpture professor, Matt Furmanski (the guy in the shades with a microphone, talking about the work on opening day). Matt does a lot of really cool work with a very industrial flavor - lots of precision engineered metal and tight craftsmanship, often rendered in a way that creates a conversation with our art history and literary heritage. This piece is called "Crossroads Oracle: A Lantern for Diogenes." It looks like a modified crosswalk post, complete with buttons, except the buttons don't activate the crosswalk, they activate recordings of thought provoking questions. Question asking is a big part of my work also, so you can imagine how much I enjoy this piece. What were the questions? You'll have to go hear for yourself... half the fun is being put on the spot in the middle of the sidewalk!

The piece is at the intersection of State and Ortega. It and the rest of the collection will be on display untill November 17 - and they are well worth a day trip up the coast to visit.

Mosaics - A visit to the Getty Villa

Last weekend, Steve and I went to the Getty Villa for the first time since its reopening early this year. Steve needed to go to research something for an art history paper - I got to tag along for the fun of it (what a role reversal!). For a virtual tour, check out www.getty.edu

The remodel of the Villa is lovely - all of the art has plenty of space to breathe, and is beautifully lit, although there were figurative sculptures along the walls in some places that I would like to have been able to walk around. The Villa houses the Getty's antiquities collection - essentially Greek and Roman goodies from BC times to the fall of the Roman Empire in the form of statues of Greek gods and scads of exceptional Greek pottery.

The thing that stood out for me most, however, were the mosaics - not only those that were artifacts, but those created as part of the decor - many of them built in mesmerizing circular motifs (the first picture is the floor of the Lansdowne Herakles' room). Just about all of the floors had some kind of interesting inlay going on - and in what I thought was a very clever expression of the museum's theme and mission, brass room numbers were also inlaid at the doorways in Roman numerals.

As you may have read in the papers over the last year, the Italian goverment is asking for some of the Getty's antiquities to be returned to them. There is much discussion as to whether the pieces were smuggled or stolen before they arrived in California. I can understand that a country would hate to lose its patrimony, but wouldn't the world's museums be boring if they only held local artwork? How would we learn about other cultures? Doesn't the fascincation with things foreign promote tourism? Isn't tourism the life blood of many a large city?

And lastly, isn't the Vatican home to the largest trove of stolen art?