Dinner and a Museum

Yesterday was my Birthday *WOOO*. So I got a day off and Blondie and I went out for dinner and a museum, which is personally my favorite way to spend an afternoon.

We went to Myers and Chang which I highly recommend to anyone with experimental tastes (or not, my BF is known to turn his nose up at "brown bread" but even admitted it was pretty good)

Then we checked out the ICA because I'd never been there before, and I wanted to see it before I left for New York. My reaction was that it was really small (only one floor of galleries) and that the video art as always, confused me, but they had a pin sculpture that we decided was pretty awesome although it made us want to kick it.

Sorry, but I don't have a camera at the moment :( it needs repairs, but this thing was awesome. They literally took thousands of straight pins, poured them into a box, peeled away the box and it resulted in a five foot cube of pins. WITH NOTHING HOLDING IT TOGETHER. NOTHING. Someone please explain the physics of that to me, because Blondie (who is a budding engineer) tried and I didn't get it, I just kept thinking "That's awesome. A magic cube of pins. What would happen if I kicked it? You think I can kick it? Is the security guard still looking? Okay, I'm going to kick it."

The main event was about Shepard Fairey, and he took up about half of the gallery. Here's the blurb on the guy if you, you know, live under a rock or aren't at all interested in art:

"From humble beginnings as a defiant, skateboard-obsessed art student pasting homemade stickers, Shepard Fairey has developed into one of the most influential street artists of our time. Despite breaking many of the spoken and unspoken rules of contemporary art and culture, his work is now seen in museums and galleries, as well as the worlds of graphic design and signature apparel. His multi-faceted, open-ended and generous artistic practice actively resists categorization. Building off of precedents set by artists such as Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, Fairey shifts easily between the realms of fine, commercial, and even political art.
Fairey's multi-layered renderings of counter-cultural revolutionaries and rap, punk and rock stars, as well as updated and re-imagined propaganda-style posters, carry his signature graphic style, marked by his frequent use of black, white, and red. Recently, his portrait of Barack Obama, a ubiquitous sight on the campaign trail, drew a new level of attention to the artist's work and was recently acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, for its collection."

and here's some pictures (look familiar?):

My overall impression about Shepard Fairey (although I had seen some of his stuff before going to the ICA) is that from a graphic design point of view and purely aesthetically, this guy is the bomb. He is absolutely a genius. He has an incredibly distinctive style, it grabs you attention, every piece is just incredible with the designs, the old newspaper headings peeking through the paint of the collages, the way he uses his proportion and balance, and the striking red, black and white... honestly I'm taking a few lessons away from this. Not to mention its incredibly fresh and dare I say "edgy" and "street". Wow, those sound weird even when I'm typing them.

However, if I'm paying attention to the messages that he's giving (because every single one does have an agenda if you haven't noticed) I'm afraid I don't always agree with they way he expresses his point of view. I'm all for peace (who isn't?) but I just feel he's a little heavy handed with the images, and slants his point of view so much that it's a turn off. Just my opinion obviously, and any good art should get people talking and make you take a stance, so he certainly accomplished that.