Knitted bunny from space
A giant knitted pink rabbit, which for the sake of this blog I shall call public art, can be spotted from space via Google Earth. Hmm, I wonder what our extra terrestrial buddies will think of us now? The knitted bunny was created by the Viennese art collective Gelatin in Italy’s Piedmont region. The pink rabbit was created for people to climb, sleep or walk on. Far too many people with far too much time on their hands, me thinks!
I don’t know if billionaire Paul Allen is happy or nervous about a petition flying around South Lake Union’s neighborhood of Cascade Park. It seems the locals are lining up to sign a petition to have a 300-foot-tall (91.4-metre) bronze statue of him erected, but not in a good way. Led by Kapow! coffee shop, businesses in the area are none too happy with his development company, Vulcan Inc, who have lured trendy shops into the area making rent triple. Vulcan owns about one-third of the South Lake Union district. One local declared “If you’ve got buildings going up too tall for people to see the lake, a 300-foot statue is kind of speaking to that, isn’t it?”
Kapow! was also behind a campaign against Vulcan’s street car project, dubbing the trolley car “the slut”. They even sold “Ride the Slut” t-shirts. And what does Vulcan’s spokeswoman have to say about Kapow’s new venture “I think Kapow! has found themselves a wonderful way to make more money poking fun at Paul Allen than selling coffee.” (ouch!). Stay tuned, this is going to be one hell of a fight batman!
Move over Agatha and hello sculptors. American sculptors are now adding detectives to their names. The police are now hiring sculptors to create life like heads and faces of victims in unsolved murder cases. Yeah, I know they have been doing this for a while, but I just found this news story so bizarre I thought I’d share. I wonder if the family members get to keep the sculpture if identified ? Doesn’t bear thinking about really.
Is everyone familiar with CowParade? If not let me fill you in. CowParade is a charity event, boasting to be the “largest Public Art event in the world”. The general gist is if comes to your city, you get hundreds of 60kg fibre glass cows to decorate and then auction off for charity. Usually the city invites celebrities and artists to decorate the beasts as that usually raises more money (and interest). Now this event is nothing to be sneezed at, it raises millions of dollars and travels all over the world. But the event also has its fair share of controversy, David “Twin Peaks” Lynch’s cow was rejected in the New York cow parade, deemed too gruesome. It had knives and forks in its back and no head.
However the biggest controversy happened in Stockholm, Sweden when one of the cows was kidnapped. A Swedish organization calling themselves The Militant Graffiti Artists of Stockholm claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and sent a video to the local new station. The militants appeared in the footage with the “hooded” cow, demanding that the organizers of the Cow Parade declare the event “non art”. Evidently the group were none too impressed with the blatant advertising sprawled all over the fibreglass cows. Needless to say their demands were ignored and the cow was decapitated. I told you I couldn’t make this up! Nobody was ever charged with this brutally funny crime.
If you spot one of these CowParade cows in your neighborhood let me know. There has got to be thousands of them around the world, but where are they ? I spotted one old cow in Denver.
