ABG

"Orchid Daze" at the ABG:

Today, grandma was meant to run off with the boy, and I was meant to take my wife on a nice horseback ride up into the Georgia hills. This plan changed due to a last-minute invitation by grandma to the wife to go down to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens for an art show. The "Orchid Daze" exhibit featured blown-glass orchids, mixed in with the large collection of real orchids, and glass frogs in with the real Amazon frogs, which was to inspire a blah-blah-blah about the cunningness of man-made artwork to reflect the beauty of nature.

It's not that I don't know anything about art. It is, I think, that I know too much about it. My mother (that is, grandma) is an artist and an art-teacher; as I just mentioned, my wife is an equine artist. I've grown up with art education, then, and when dating I spent years hanging around the world-famous Savannah College of Art and Design, discussing art theory and going to exhibits both of famous artists and up and coming ones. I've been surrounded by art and art theory, folk art and fine art, since I was a child.

I've long ago figured out that there are just three kinds of artists: craftsmen, spiritualists, and people who are faking it. There are more of the last kind than anyone else, and they make up almost all the "concept" artists. The more somebody has to say about what their art means, the less it is really worth. Not in terms of dollars -- most consumers of art aren't smart enough to see through the line of salesmanship to realize they are buying a piece of canvas with one red line on it. (This is a fact that the Pop Artist, Warhol and the like, openly enjoyed.) The real depth of the work, though, is not going to be found in concept art.

This Frabel is a craftsman, and his stuff is good. His orchids in particular are very good. It's no wonder they liked them at the garden -- but if you're not that into orchids (and I am definitely not), you'll quickly tire.

On the other hand, there was some faker art out in the gardens that was... well, as you'd expect it wasn't that great. There was one real exception to the rule, however: the six-ton skull.

What made this piece great was not the concept, which... ah, well, read the article if you want the line of chatter. Supposedly it's all about earthy feminism and a 'new age of martiarchy.' Hey, maybe some people find it deeply feminine to sit in a giant skull and meditate. That wasn't what made it work, though.

What made the six-ton skull great wasn't its feminist qualities, but the fact that it was a huge, brightly-colored skull that you were allowed to crawl on. It wasn't its ability to speak to martiarchy, in other words, but its ability to speak to children.

Every child in the place, and especially every boy, loved it. They could clamber all over it. They could sit in the nose like a chair. They could crawl down into the jaws and howl out through the teeth. They could stick palm fronds out through the mouth like a big tongue, and try to "lick" other kids as they ran past. They could sit inside and scream, making it echo.

They loved it. That doesn't make it "great art" -- after all, kids love Barney the Dinosaur. Still, it does make it a worthy investment on the part of the Garden. I say that without knowing exactly how much was invested -- even a six-ton skull is only so valuable. Assuming they didn't let the line of chat drag more money out of them than was reasonable, though, it was a nifty thing to buy.