Help! I am feeling mighty grumpy and curmudgeonly because I find this whole NYC Waterfalls project by Olafur Eliasson and company (which cost $15 MILLION USD) grossly inappropriate for these times of recession, global upheaval, oil shock, and peak oil.
....jump....
I gotta tell you first off that I am an artist myself. My medium is not so macro as Olafur Eliasson’s, I use pen an ink – maybe 75 cents at the most for any one project. I am also a photographer, that costs maybe $5,000 total in the past year or two.
I have also had training in architecture (Tulane School of Architecture) so I can appreciate a good architectural hack when I see one. This waterfall project? Not getting the beauty thang or any hack vibe.
In a time when so many are starving in Africa and other parts of the world, food scarcities are racing across the globe, the Midwest croplands are DYING from water, when school districts are having to kill bus routes and I PAY SO DAMN MUCH FOR GAS that I am thankful every day that we have our own chickens for protein...
What the hell were Bloomberg and Essiason and the Public Art Fund thinking that this is such a nifty idea?
As a scientist, I shiver thinking about what sorts of nasties and chemicals and lord ONLY knows what else is being aerosolized in these waterfalls that source their water from the dirty river below.
Am I the only one here who finds this, after what must have been a boat load of time and worry, a waste of resources and an unfortunate symbol of misdirected priorities?
Maybe I have just lost all sense of artistic adventure, I am not sure. I am not the sort to salivate over big name artists, I am much more interested in cultivating the art in ALL of us.
Take a moment to think of how MANY artists could have received life-changing dream-enabling quantities of money instead of this one project.