Art and Democracy

In her work Laughing Crowd Sound Piece, Angela Bulloch purposefully discomforts museumgoers. As viewers walk through a space, their presence triggers sounds of laughing and jeering. By making museum-goers the subject of judgment, Bulloch turns the viewers into art themselves. She positions them as victims to inescapable judgment and anonymous criticism, just like the art…

Defacing a public structure is a harmless but rebellious act that reaches a larger public. This institution of art can be easily marked as elitist and closed off, but when art is made for the street it’s for everyone. The 1980s marked the heart of the Street Art movement, but participating in it was a…

Ai Weiwei destroyed an authentic Han Dynasty Urn. This was not just a theoretical, or representative, eradication like so much art is; Weiwei literally broke the history that he does not agree with, which speaks to a greater political message. This provocative action represents how artist can lead to wonderfully captivating conceptual artworks. Weiwei brought…

What better way to physically represent a problematic democracy than turning it into a glorified shit hole. America, by Maurizio Cattelan in 2016, is a fully functioning 18k gold toilet installed in the Guggenheim Museum as a long-term sculptural performance and interactive art piece. The toilet was placed in the museum’s single stall gender-neutral bathroom and…

Through the simple act of sitting across from another human being, Marina Abramovic confronts us with the desocialized state of our society. Free market capitalism paired with the role of technology in the modern age have taken away so many moments of common human interaction. When was the last time you had a full length…

Let’s talk about sexism in culture today. What day to day racism do certain people experience? Why don’t we have an honest conversation about sex? 2 Dope Queens, a podcast by Phoebe Robinson and Jessica Williams, discusses cultural issues with a hilarious tone. This pair of female comedians do not shy away from many topics…

Why should I care? is, perhaps, the easiest and most difficult question to answer. Take, for example, the shooting of Philando Castile. I say easy because of course we should care that a free man was targeted and killed because of the bigotry of an institution meant to protect all citizens. I say difficult because some…

Cildo Meireles’ 1970 conceptual work, Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project explore the notion and exchange of goods, bringing attention to how wealth and power are manifested in the circulation of everyday bought objects. For Coca Cola Project, Meireles took Coca-Cola bottles and modified them by adding questions, slogans or illustrations in a font and…

Waiting for Tear Gas, Allan Sekula’s anti-journalistic manifesto, is a fourteen-minute slide sequence containing a loop of eighty-one photographs that Sekula took as a protester during the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. His project challenges the images presented by the mainstream media of protests, which are often dramatic images of seemingly uncontrolled…

Haaning’s sound piece “Turkish Jokes” was originally played in a public square in Oslo, Norway. Haaning attached a loudspeaker to a light pole, and broadcasted jokes told by Turks in their native language. There is a large Turkish immigrant population Oslo, and any Turkish speaker walking through the square while the jokes were being played…