Mass Distractions and Cultural Decay

The new gallery exhibition has a lot of good representations of past and present American culture. My favorite piece was Michael Paul Britto's "Unarmed" 2007 digital video with sound. I am not much of a video fanatic because I find them to be too complex and sometimes hard to understand. People don't walk up to watch a video because it is aesthetically pleasing, they have to be drawn to it in other ways such as video descriptions if it's long etc. Anyways, I liked this video by Britto because it was short simple and to the point. I found the message about racism to be clear. The video was at eye-level and it showed a leggo cop raising his arm and shooting after each clip of a black or hispanic leggo flashed on the screen. Although this video was made in 2007, I think it's ironic that this video can perfectly represent the events occurring present day New Brunswick. The protests against racism happen everyday within the town due to a cop recently shooting an alleged innocent colored man who was in fact, unarmed. It goes to show that since this artist made a piece representing such a scene, means that it happens too often and that it has become a flaw in our culture. Racism is not dead and I think that is the point he was trying to make. I also noted the fact that the cop was white which has a lot to do with it, if he had put another race as the cop, the story would take on a different meaning such as abuse of authoritative powers.

The piece that I wasn't impressed with was Sam Durant's "Defaced Monuments" 2008. I thought it was a great concept but the way it was executed seemed kind of lazy. Being a design major and seeing how someone put together pictures and images and presents them has a lot of importance in the success of their project. This project was displayed on the computer, not at eye-level and the images were in the top left corner kind of small and the typeface was Times New Roman. Even non-designers know that Times New Roman is totally boring. Anyway I think this would have just been more successful with more attention to design. :)