Very very cool! They did a great job lighting in the video, showing the gap created for the swinger to traverse.

http://www.youtube.com/user/dash7design?feature=watch

I was expecting something much less sophisticated and much less elegant – a levered shield equidistant from the seat above the anchor bar, pivoting back and forth to block the stream coming from higher above.

So if my definition isn’t good enough, what would you suggest it is?  Because when you have Pollock letting the paint do what it wants to on a canvas over by a Banky wall and a crucifix upside down in urine next to a sheep in formaldehyde adjacent to Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes (where the art isn’t actually the tubes themselves but the original drawings used to define the arrangement!) all selling for millions of dollars and inspiring people to imagine and think differently, it’s going to be pretty hard to fit it all in.

Art doesn’t even need to make a statement, any statement. It can have other purposes. And it’s a bit backwards to try to claim those things aren’t art, when they hold the initial claim, instead of just coming up with your own term for the particular niche you seem to be describing.

Not that difficult after all.  I find the created work of art itself to be more important than trying to decide if it’s art or not.  Does every art mean something to me?  Certainly not, but not everything I create means something to everyone else.  So I didn’t make that piece for them, I probably made something else for them.  Does that make the previous piece less art if someone else is intensely moved by it?

It’s up to the viewer or critic to make their own definition.  You might not like the piece, but that doesn’t make it Not Art.

It’s glorious even in this video… I can’t imagine the experience of full immersion, the white noise of the waterfall, the cold humidity, the discontinuity of thrusting a hand into the downpour, the merger of sheltered vacuoles in an embrace amid the torrent.

Does it need to be a painting?  Sculpture?  Architecture?  Photography?  Or do you only know it when you see it?

I only ask because I recently swung by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Warhol show, to be greeted by a pile of candy in a corner.  Which we were encouraged to take and eat.

Is that art?  Is it because it’s in a museum?  Because it’s by someone that a curator considers an artist?  Does it cease to be art when I pick it up and eat it?  Does the candy change to art then back to candy at some point?  I still have the wrapper, is it art or trash?

For Rain Room, does the rain become art when dancers are added to it?  Or are only the dancers art and the set isn’t?

My point?  Qualifying art is actually more useless than actually making something and calling it art.