POST BY JULIA HALPERIN
Vik Muniz, Manhattan II, 2001, From the series, Pictures of Clouds
Editor’s note: AFC+ is a series in which interns respond to Internet culture and art world events.
Thursday night at the Whitney Museum,Vik Muniz mentioned checking the weather on his computer. “It said it was 35˚C, or something,” he said, “but then it said, it feels like 20.” Muniz explained that this discrepancy seemed to exemplify an artist’s job—to find and express a “binding agent” between the tangible world and how humans experience it. He cited his recreation of the backs of famous paintings as an example; we experience Demoiselles d’Avignon as an iconic image, he explained, but when we see only the back, we come to recognize it as an object.
Human experience, recognition, and tangibility were some of the many big ideas tossed around at Thursday’s panel, Why Does Art Matter? Like Muniz, the other panelists—physicist Lisa Randall, pollster and fivethirtyeight.com creator Nate Silver, and choreographer Elizabeth Streb—attempt to make slippery concepts tangible and recognizable through their work. Though the concepts range from alternate dimensions to political trends to movement itself, each of the panelists works with scale and movement, is concerned with isolation vs. contextualization, and uses his or her work to expand previous definitions within their chosen disciplines. MORE »
