"Is architecture the dominant visual art form of the day?"

Tyler Green asks. It's an interesting question and James Russell offers his own to-the-point answer:

There's another reason for architecture's ascendance. $75 million will buy you one Van Gogh -- or a very nice museum addition to put it and a few hundred other works of art in. So architecture, for the high-end collector class, remains a BARGAIN.

For myself, I don't think the answer to Tyler's question is even remotely "yes." But if it were so, the upshot might well be a good news/bad news one. It's good that more people are supposedly paying attention to the built environment.

The bad news is that their experience is largely mediated through
1. images in the media and
2. words of intellectual impostors like Herbert Muschamp (to pick out the most important imposter.)

I hear people "ooing!" and "cooing!" -- some even here in the blogosphere! -- about buildings like Gehry's Disney Hall -- but very few have ever been there, so their enthusiasm is a bit odd, a bit off-pitch, like the pre-mature laugh before the punch-line to the joke is even voiced. Their experience and "appreciation" for the building is entirely formed by opinions in the media and by photos. They do not know the building but they like the photos and the words spoon-fed to them.

So perhaps Tyler's question might better be "Is media-hype the dominant art form of the day?"

Comments

[blake]

I haven't been to Bilbao or Disney Hall, but my general impression from what I've read is that these works are deficient in their attention to human spaces.

I have been to the one in Prague and the Case Western Business School, which are somewhat better, perhaps because they are buildings designed with more of an active human use in mind.

[Thomas]

Note that there's a difference between experiencing a building on the site and seeing the building in pictures, abstracted from the site. It's easy to like and be impressed by all sorts of abominations when looking at the glossy pictures in the coffee table books.