Objectification will always be around, advertising depends on it

[rrneck]

373. Nah, he signed up for it.

I did a paper on the project in undergraduate school. It is oriented to be hard to walk around and it's a specific height to annoy people inside the building. He is actually quoted as saying it was a statement about his anger with the government. That's cool, but charging the government to install art that will annoy people who didn't have a say about what it would look like is kind of a dick move.

You're right about the complications of mixing art and politics. I remember the NEA controversy. What a mess. When people ask me what art is one of my stock answers is "cultural R&D". That's a worthy objective for government dollars. I obviously support federal funding for the arts. If it was up to me we would reduce the military budget by half and give the money to the artists, but I might be prejudiced.

It's dicey because art is not something that you can vote on, and government money sort of comes from accumulated votes. So it's hard to make good art without annoying the people paying for it. Check out the work of Komar and Melamid.