How to "curate" and claim the public's trust without actual artistic responsibility or vision. Le sigh.

Rendering of the finished trail, sans art.

Went to go hear a talk about integrating art into the Bloomingdale Trail (never 606!) and it was so amorphous and imprecise it made me angry. Art should be exploratory, but it needs a starting point, and that point—when you've received the public trust to curate something in a grand manner that stretches over miles and miles—shouldn't be based on "so I'm depending on you to tell me what you want" in front of a room of people with no vision. It reeks of a preemptive attempt to dodge blame so that when our dear curator unveils something uninspired and pedestrian the onus can be said to have fallen on a public that never voiced their desire when no true framework for that desire was ever supplied outside of "innovative use of public space" and "living art that will develop along with the environment around that" sans a single specific example.

Art requires vision, and what I heard tonight was how first year college students talk around vision instead of expanding upon it.