Alternative Visions to Denver Airport NWO Murals

[slomo]

They're not even trying to pretend anymore:

DIA's blue 'Mustang' has big competition

DENVER - Ever since it was first installed at Denver International Airport, the 32-foot-tall blue "Mustang" has been the talk of the town, but a new addition is sure to get plenty of attention.

A crew is installing a seven-ton, 26-foot-tall concrete sculpture of an Egyptian god at the airport.

Anubis, a statue with a jackal-head, will be built south of the Jeppesen Terminal.

Although part of the lore of the 9,000-pound "Mustang" is that its creator, Luis Jiménez, was tragically killed while making the piece, Anubis may be even more notorious. He's the Egyptian god of death and the afterlife.

It's being put in to preview the Denver Art Museum's King Tut exhibit.

The exhibit runs June 29 through Jan. 9, 2011, and Anubis will be standing guard during that time.

(Via Cryptogon)

[JackRiddler]

Someone's going to have to explain in ideas, not squeals, why an Anubis statue to promote the King Tut exhibition is prima facie a bad thing. Is it Anubis? The Tut exhibition? The fact that it's at the Airport of Evil?

The OP is bullshit:

DURING MOST OF THE 20TH CENTURY, the type of propaganda that has been hurled at academic artists is so insidious that people have been literally trained to discredit, out-of-hand, any work containing well-crafted figures or elements, or any other evidence of technical mastery. All the beauty and subtlety of emotions, -- interplay of composition, design and theme, -- the interlacing of color, tone and mood, -- are never seen. The viewer has been taught that academic painting on a prima facie basis is bad by definition -- bad by virtue of its resorting to the use of human figures, themes or stories and objects from the real world.

Hurled! Insidious! Literally trained! Never seen! And it goes on from there in much the same vein. This is not just exaggerated but wildly untrue and ignorant. It seethes with obsessive resentment and an insular view that characterizes its unnamed nemeses without actually citing them by name. The author seems deeply intimidated by the fear that there might be snobs out there who think they know something he doesn't.

But I guess being rejected by art school has caused even worse fits? (Sorry, I couldn't resist the joke. Probably not the case.)

The works on Fred Ross's site are cute. Not bad, really, just kind of monotonous. A lot of soft-lit females. Mildly kitschy. Technically perfect, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. (The site also lays claim to the entire figurative tradition from Duerer to Goya, but they're all dead so I'm sure they don't object.)

No doubt these works have their market, so what's the beef? Who's afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?

The world must never be forgiven for the set of decades in which the high art market showed a preference for abstraction and idea over form!

[semper occultus]

I dunno though - the whole "conceptual" art thing did de-generate into a celeb-driven up-its-own-arse piss-take

art-for-a-change.com

Stuckism was founded a few years ago in England by figurative painters who were sick of the tyranny of postmodern art. The name Stuckist was based on an insult. A prize winning conceptual artist hurled an insult at a realist painter, saying: "You're stuck! Stuck, stuck, stuck!" Thus a movement was born. Stuckists were outraged that the United Kingdom's highest honor for artistic achievement, the vaunted Turner Prize, was being handed out to people who didn't even paint (the irony being that JMW Turner, the artist after which the prize was named, was one of England's greatest painters). Stuckistas released a manifesto that insolently proclaimed...
"Those who do not paint are not artists!"

The rhetoric of revolutionaries can often sound inflammatory and unreasonable, but the Stuckists do have a point. When the 2002 Turner Prize of $40,000 was awarded to Keith Tyson for having created a large black monolithic block filled with discarded computers, not a single Painter had been considered as a possible recipient of the prize. Fiona Banner, Turner Prize finalist for 2002, entered a billboard emblazoned with pornographic text. Co-finalist, Liam Gillick, offered a ceiling constructed of multicolored plastic. Previous prize winning entries included a dead sheep in formaldehyde by Damian Hirst, a portrait of the Virgin Mary "painted" with elephant dung by Chris Ofili, and a white room with a single light bulb that blinked on and off by Martin Creed. Past finalist Tracy Emin entered an unmade bed soiled with condoms and tampons.

A major blow to the fortress-like walls of the postmodern art establishment was delivered in December of 2002 just prior to the annual Turner Prize awards, when U.K. Culture Minister, Kim Howells ignited a firestorm of argument over exactly what art should be in the present period. Dr Howells, publicly upset over the quality of entries for the 2002 Turner Prize, stated flatly, "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit."
Howells went on to encourage new artists to oppose the "new orthodoxy... the art establishment is a very small elite which believes it has a monopoly of wisdom when it comes to art."

[slomo]

Someone's going to have to explain in ideas, not squeals, why an Anubis statue to promote the King Tut exhibition is prima facie a bad thing. Is it Anubis? The Tut exhibition? The fact that it's at the Airport of Evil?

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with Anubis. As a practicing pagan, I respect Anubis' position in the Egyptian pantheon, and the general archetype which He represents. The trouble I have with Denver Airport is the collective vibe created by the various murals and artwork there. It's like they are trying to create a temple to the Underworld. OK, that's fine, the gods all deserve their due, but can we not pretend that we are a "Christian Nation" anymore? Let's just admit that we are a nation that follows the extremely old ways, including that good-old-fashioned offering to the Nameless Ones, human sacrifice? Because otherwise we are just being dishonest with ourselves.

[JackRiddler]

I dunno though - the whole "conceptual" art thing did de-generate into a celeb-driven up-its-own-arse piss-take

Which describes the state of the late 19th century establishment, the romantic realist art in the vein of Jerome and David (the 18th century painter, not the sculpture of the Hebrew king) that the early modernists rebelled against.

Ever since, art history has seen a long series of new currents and gangs arise, each with their own manifesto seeking to smash the perceived corruption and dominance of the supposed orthodoxy. (The late works of modernism's true grandfather, Goya, practiced iconoclasm on the dominant style and themes of which he earlier had been the greatest exemplar.) Everyone had their manifesto or club, the Fauvists, the Cubists, Dada and Surrealism, Social Realists, Futurists, Abstract Expressionists...

"Those who do not paint are not artists!"

This is nonsense and has never been true.

A major blow to the fortress-like walls of the postmodern art establishment

Projection. The "fortress" falls every generation. There hasn't been a single dominant high-art concept since the 1950s.

U.K. Culture Minister

I rest my case.

[JackRiddler]

Someone's going to have to explain in ideas, not squeals, why an Anubis statue to promote the King Tut exhibition is prima facie a bad thing. Is it Anubis? The Tut exhibition? The fact that it's at the Airport of Evil?

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with Anubis. As a practicing pagan, I respect Anubis' position in the Egyptian pantheon, and the general archetype which He represents. The trouble I have with Denver Airport is the collective vibe created by the various murals and artwork there. It's like they are trying to create a temple to the Underworld. OK, that's fine, the gods all deserve their due, but can we not pretend that we are a "Christian Nation" anymore? Let's just admit that we are a nation that follows the extremely old ways, including that good-old-fashioned offering to the Nameless Ones, human sacrifice? Because otherwise we are just being dishonest with ourselves.

The scary propaganda about the luciferian DIA comes from a strain of those who believe in a "Christian Nation" but "we" are not a "Christian Nation," and anyone who wants that is enemy to this American born.

Who's the board at DIA who commissions the art? They may not be "Christian nation," but they're also not running the nation, if most other places are an indication. Go down the road to the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs -- now there's an institution of Death, Ueber Alles -- and check out the all-too living "Christian nation." It's not Christian in a sense the New Testament Christ character would recognize, but very Christian in the way it's meant by those Americans who would call this a "Christian nation."

[slomo]

Someone's going to have to explain in ideas, not squeals, why an Anubis statue to promote the King Tut exhibition is prima facie a bad thing. Is it Anubis? The Tut exhibition? The fact that it's at the Airport of Evil?

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with Anubis. As a practicing pagan, I respect Anubis' position in the Egyptian pantheon, and the general archetype which He represents. The trouble I have with Denver Airport is the collective vibe created by the various murals and artwork there. It's like they are trying to create a temple to the Underworld. OK, that's fine, the gods all deserve their due, but can we not pretend that we are a "Christian Nation" anymore? Let's just admit that we are a nation that follows the extremely old ways, including that good-old-fashioned offering to the Nameless Ones, human sacrifice? Because otherwise we are just being dishonest with ourselves.

The scary propaganda about the luciferian DIA comes from a strain of those who believe in a "Christian Nation" but "we" are not a "Christian Nation," and anyone who wants that is enemy to this American born.

Who's the board at DIA who commissions the art? They may not be "Christian nation," but they're also not running the nation, if most other places are an indication. Go down the road to the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs -- now there's an institution of Death, Ueber Alles -- and check out the all-too living "Christian nation." It's not Christian in a sense the New Testament Christ character would recognize, but very Christian in the way it's meant by those Americans who would call this a "Christian nation."

Fair enough. Still, there is a vibe there at Denver Airport (and, actually, all of Denver, if you want my honest opinion) of death worship. Again, that's fine, every god deserves his temple. But our whole nation is basically a death-cult, "Christian" or not. We refuse to come to terms with that. I'm just commenting on the way it seems to seep out of our unconscious and into public life, in metaphoric ways (i.e. art) as well as literal (i.e. all of the whiz-bang technology created by our military for the express purpose of killing large numbers).

[JackRiddler]

You may be right about a pattern, but that doesn't mean any and every specific event can be forced into the pattern.

I don't understand why Las Vegas - all of it - hasn't inspired the same alarm.


That's not even Luxor, it's Giza. Ah, never mind.

[Simulist]

I agree that our nation is basically a "death-cult," and that it refuses to come to terms with itself.

That said, if someone is looking for a symbol illustrative of this fact, the Crucifix is far more powerful (in this culture) and plentiful.

[hanshan]

Someone's going to have to explain in ideas, not squeals, why an Anubis statue to promote the King Tut exhibition is prima facie a bad thing. Is it Anubis? The Tut exhibition? The fact that it's at the Airport of Evil?

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with Anubis. As a practicing pagan, I respect Anubis' position in the Egyptian pantheon, and the general archetype which He represents. The trouble I have with Denver Airport is the collective vibe created by the various murals and artwork there. It's like they are trying to create a temple to the Underworld. OK, that's fine, the gods all deserve their due, but can we not pretend that we are a "Christian Nation" anymore? Let's just admit that we are a nation that follows the extremely old ways, including that good-old-fashioned offering to the Nameless Ones, human sacrifice? Because otherwise we are just being dishonest with ourselves.

The scary propaganda about the luciferian DIA comes from a strain of those who believe in a "Christian Nation" but "we" are not a "Christian Nation," and anyone who wants that is enemy to this American born.

Who's the board at DIA who commissions the art? They may not be "Christian nation," but they're also not running the nation, if most other places are an indication. Go down the road to the Air Force Academy and Colorado Springs -- now there's an institution of Death, Ueber Alles -- and check out the all-too living "Christian nation." It's not Christian in a sense the New Testament Christ character would recognize, but very Christian in the way it's meant by those Americans who would call this a "Christian nation."

Fair enough. Still, there is a vibe there at Denver Airport (and, actually, all of Denver, if you want my honest opinion) of death worship. Again, that's fine, every god deserves his temple. But our whole nation is basically a death-cult, "Christian" or not. We refuse to come to terms with that. I'm just commenting on the way it seems to seep out of our unconscious and into public life, in metaphoric ways (i.e. art) as well as literal (i.e. all of the whiz-bang technology created by our military for the express purpose of killing large numbers).

astute & aware. what a pleasure...

[Nordic]

[quote="slomo"] Still, there is a vibe there at Denver Airport (and, actually, all of Denver, if you want my honest opinion) of death worship. /quote]

You're gonna have to explain that, because I lived in Denver for years and sure never picked up on that little detail.

I was living there when DIA was announced, and built, and if I remember correctly, part of the deal to move the airport and build a new one involved giving the new airport a HUGE budget for artwork. I mean, it was big. So look no farther than whoever they appointed to be in charge of that. Because again, the airport people just did that as part of their deal, so I don't think they really cared once they were able to start construction. I'm pretty sure they gave carte blanche in other words.

But all that aside, you REALLY need to explain about the "death worship vibe" in Denver. Where exactly?

[82_28]

Still, there is a vibe there at Denver Airport (and, actually, all of Denver, if you want my honest opinion) of death worship. /quote]

You're gonna have to explain that, because I lived in Denver for years and sure never picked up on that little detail.

I was living there when DIA was announced, and built, and if I remember correctly, part of the deal to move the airport and build a new one involved giving the new airport a HUGE budget for artwork. I mean, it was big. So look no farther than whoever they appointed to be in charge of that. Because again, the airport people just did that as part of their deal, so I don't think they really cared once they were able to start construction. I'm pretty sure they gave carte blanche in other words.

But all that aside, you REALLY need to explain about the "death worship vibe" in Denver. Where exactly?

I have more to say here, being a Denver native -- I even have been tossing around a blog idea about the weirdness of Denver for a couple years. But I do think there is something about Denver. Perhaps it's how brown and lifeless it becomes in winter. Dunno. But boy do I miss the food there. Blue Bonnet, Benny's, even Old Chicago (chain now), Jerusalem on east Evans by DU. Just the green chile is what I miss the most! You cannot get it out here! Also Go Rockies, Nuggets, Avs and most of all COME THE FUCK ON BRONCOS!!!



If I put some thoughts together, I will post more on this subject.

For now, check:

http://buckfifty.org/

I haven't checked the site in awhile, but it is chalk full of historical Denver errata. All of the above FWIW.

[Nordic]

Denver is definitely weird. That's one of the things I liked about it. But a "death worship vibe?"

Gee, I missed that somehow.

[82_28]

Some say this movie "Over the Edge" foreshadowed Columbine. It came out in 1978 I believe and was filmed in suburban Denver. I highly recommend seeing it -- way ahead of it's time. It looks like a period piece filmed just last year or so.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over_the_Edge_(film)

Oddly, a friend of mine lived in the apartment building shown in the film some 20 years later. Oh Jesus, I have so much more. I really do. I've been mulling this shit over for years. Does Denver "worship" death? Not exactly, but there is something to it there. There really is something bleak about Denver and I don't quite know what. I love the place to "death". I've never been able to put my finger on it.

Say, Jeff, are we getting blogs soon?

[slomo]

You may be right about a pattern, but that doesn't mean any and every specific event can be forced into the pattern.

I don't understand why Las Vegas - all of it - hasn't inspired the same alarm.


That's not even Luxor, it's Giza. Ah, never mind.

My ex-partner, who was (in spite of being kind of a jerk) pretty psychically aware, used to say this about Las Vegas (where he often had to go for business trips): "I always feel it's the kind of place where, if you're not careful, your soul will get pick-pocketed".