Glass artist Dale Chihuly plays with fire and the audacity of beauty

What does that have to do with anything?

Someone remarked on the hard work and skill that it takes to do this. I just wanted to make sure that the credit for the hard work and skill is going where it belongs: to Chihuly for pioneering his technique, for providing the vision for each piece, and for passing along the technique to his students, but also to the students themselves for the still-incredibly-difficult work that they’re doing.

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That’s hilarious. I’ll have to share that with my friend who dropped a $5000 piece while installing it at the library. Although she may not find it all that comforting.

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The natural setting is a “thing” with displaying his work. He also had an exhibition at the Denver botanic gardens, and I’ve heard of similar exhibitions in Seattle and elsewhere.

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Elbow grease and art art two very different things. If one looks at art to appreciate the physical effort or skill required to produce it they are not looking at art at all.

I would say that he is an excellent draftsman. That guy can really use a pencil. And I mean that sincerely.

One can appreciate both the beauty of the Mona Lisa’s smile and the masterful brushstrokes of the painting.

Or, to put it another way, the writer, director, and actor in a movie are all artists, and any of them can ruin the work of art or raise it to a higher level.

Are you truly trying to imply that Chihuly’s students add no creative value to the pieces that they work on whatsoever?

ETA: it’s also incredibly arrogant to tell other people that their way of appreciating art is wrong.

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Those are amazing images, thank you! This is definitely the sort of stuff he does at other arboretums.

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Those aren’t mine, just pics I pulled off the “webs”. I do remember when the exhibit was in town though.

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Arrogant? Well duh. But still…

appreciating the craft of a thing is just different than appreciating the thing as art is all.

No big deal really.

I disagree. The medium is at least part of the message. Art is about saying something, and what you say is fundamentally linked to how you say it.

A sonnet imposes limits on the number of lines, the number of syllables in a line, which syllables are stressed. which lines can rhyme, and a few other things.

You’re probably not going to be counting the syllables or noting down how well each pair of rhyming lines rhymes, or how many times a word has been used already when listening to a sonnet; that doesn’t mean that things like that won’t catch your ear. A sonnet which follows the rules will necessarily sound better, even to an untrained ear, than one that doesn’t, and breaking those rules might even be done deliberately to cause such a dissonance, as part of the effect you’re trying to create with your poem.

The care taken to craft something necessarily affects how well you can absorb the intended message. Appreciation of the craft and the message are intrinsically linked.

I met him once briefly. He designed sculpture at an art museum I worked at.

His stuff is basically like Andy Warhol. He doesn’t even do most of the work any more, IIRC. He over sees workers creating all the glass pieces. So it is sort of commercialized art, which is sorta ok because it make art more accessible… though it does get blase after awhile.

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oh my GOD

Yeah, guy’s an asshole, no question.

Andy Warhol was a thinker… no, but really.

It’s not the assistants that make his work bankrupt. And it’s not that it relies so much on the intrinsic beauty of glass, though that’s an important part of it. It’s the intent.
He produces what amounts to Thomas Kincade for the top 5%.
The sale-able objects are just that, expensive trinkets.
The large installations are advertisements for the trinkets.

Chihuly’s got his flaws, but all prominent artists I know of do, and slagging artists it pretty tedious to me. Are there any people working in the art glass world you like? For monumental pieces, I think Sergio Redegalli’s work is really interesting. I like a lot of Ikuta Niyoko’s work. Jack Storms is often amazing. While he mostly does warm glass, I love everything Jeremy Lepisto does, and he can do like everything (took a class with him, so I’m biased). There’s a hundred other people too.

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I don’t much like glass. I mean blown or stained. It’s the intrinsic beauty thing. It just seems like an extra layer of difficulty to surmount to get to meaning.
Sure it’s beautiful and cool but is the meaning visible though all that, or is that the meaning in itself? And if so, what da’ ya’ got?

And if what you are getting at is better expressed as an earth work, a laser show, or a carnival act then it aught be one of them… or all three.

Depends on the artist how they approach things, some are more into technically difficult pieces that look beautiful and just sort of astound you when you see them like Jack Storms:

others are artists using glass as a medium to express a meaningful artistic vision. Jeremy Lepisto’s stuff’s more in the latter camp (though there are many, many others):

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I’d say both of these pieces are head and shoulders…
The top one, how big is it? It looks to be mostly about the medium itself, but I guess you said that.
Plus, pretty.
The lower brings on the question, for me, of “why is it glass?” But, that’s a question that I enjoy wondering about. I think I’d have to see it

It’s around 8 inches. Those kind of pieces are the sorts of things you have to see in person to really appreciate.

While that piece doesn’t really do much with it, since a lot of his work is exploring printing on glass, Lepisto uses layering, varying translucence and bubbles and things as part of the medium. I like layered printing on glass esp., there’s a lot of interesting things you can do there, though it’s hard when you’re dealing with printing on a thing that’s a fluid at some points during the process.

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