Up the street is a small public park where people walk their dogs and play with their kids in a forest of redwoods. To everyone’s delight there appeared a little hobbit door on one of the trees some time back, soon surrounded by toy trolls brought by secret Santas. Then there were two, a row of little windows higher up on another tree. We could all just see the little kids joyfully finding the surprise. Now these carefully constructed and lovingly painted doors are sprouting throughout the park, as of last count seven or eight, and I, for one, am starting to get annoyed because I feel like I’ve landed in some miniature golf course or theme park instead of nature.
We know, of course, that people have a tendency to beautify and structure their environments. Yarn bombers are a case in point. They knit and crochet their merry ways across the landscape – sometimes creating beautiful work that really brightens the sidewalks, sometimes annoying public artists because their metal sculptures regularly end up with scarves…. (the oldest of the street knitters being 104 years old.http://www.boredpanda.com/grandmother-yarn-bomb-uk-souter-stormers-knitting-104-year-old-grace-brett/.) Sometimes the police takes down work that took months to complete for traffic safety and eventually, where do you find these creations? In art museums! Here was one interesting project at the Tate http://knitthecity.com/2012/10/09/half-sick-of-stitching/ .
I wonder when the line is crossed from novelty to nuisance, from craft to art.
The photographs of Orly Genger’s work Red, Yellow and Blue were taken in Madison Square Park, NY in 2013. She weaves and paints and constructs these sculptures to fit particularly environments. Their beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Which cannot be said for the following scenario, just now happening in Berlin Tegel. The wall painting, showing a blood covered girl and an impaled man, is upsetting the neighbors including a daycare center for young children who look at it from their playground. They are trying to have it removed, but by what legal means given private ownership? I guess, I should be grateful for little hobbit doors after all.
There are whole empires of these free ports, from Luxembourg to Singapore, allowing art to be un-seen. Why on earth, you might ask? The answer is of course: money. And I am not just talking about hedge funds, derivatives or futures applied to art collection. Rather, art out of view is the perfect way to launder dirty money since there is no transparency.
Look at the materials needed – look at the size of the Reichstag that he wrapped – not likely he walked into the Michaels Crafts Emporium and said give me some 55,000 m2 of silver-grey shiny polyester fabric and 23 km of rope (which is exactly what the used to wrap a winter landscape of trees in Basel, Switzerland.) I have never seen one of these artworks in real life, but admired when I heard him in an interview how he simply refers to the pleasure and joy art can transmit without having to have deeper meaning. They always mention that the materials are recycled after the project is taken down (some criticism has always attacked the size of their endeavors) but I have yet to figure out what sources they use. Definitely not these: This Lower Eastside fabric outlet, there for generations, sold part of its building on Grant St. last year to some bank for $25.6 million – I guess upholstery didn’t pay the rent with Ikea in town….
My pick of all of them is Hannah Höch, one of the pioneers of photomontage, a member of the Dadaist movement (although not recognized, maybe even edged out, until the lat 1960s when her works started to appear regularly in major retrospectives.) Two years ago her works were shown in Great Britain by the Whitechapel Gallery – here is a review of her and her art. 
