Met my friend Emily downtown today. We went to a couple of new places. First up was the Chicago Cultural Center. I didn’t even know this place was here. It is a free art/cultural gallery in the old Chicago library. It is such an amazing building and it was great to see contemporary artist from Chicago on display in a gallery setting. Some of the stuff was a little out there, but some of it was really good. They had a couple of video pieces there. It reminds me of the crappy stuff that we used to see at the Krannert Student (or Faculty) shows. Maybe I am just a video snob, but I expect a little better execution when people use video as a medium. It may seem easy to point a video camera and shoot some footage, but in reality if these people want to be serious artist they should spend as much time learning the craft as a painter would learning his medium. Too much of a free pass on some of this stuff.
After lunch we hit the Gallery 37 shop. I feel bad that I thought most of the pieces were pretty bad, then realized that it was all done by young students. You have to give a lot of credit to people this young putting their art work out there. Not sure who would spend $400 on an amateur painting, but I guess there are people who will.
Then from there we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. They have a new Jeff Koons exhibit going up. They had the galleries roped off, but we were able to see his large balloon sculptures in there. Not only that, but he was in there himself. He was doing an interview on camera for something. Got to see Jeff Koons, but didn’t get to touch him. 🙁
The rest of the museum was a little depressing. Don’t know what is up with artist these days but they have chosen to focus mostly on the dark side. I guess that I just don’t get it. I wanted something happier.
Forgot to mention: I saw my friend Chris Derose driving one of the trolleys downtown. He didn’t even run me over. I really need to check those tours out.
