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Spiral Jetty: Land art vs short term gain

February 6th, 02008 by Alexander Rose - Twitter: @zander

I just saw this press release from the Dia Center for the Arts that the site of the Spiral Jetty (Smithson’s 1970 seminal land art piece on the Great Salt Lake in UT) is being threatened by oil drilling interests. If you would like to voice your opinion on it before the deadline on Feb 13th there is contact information and even sample letters in the press release.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 02008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Long Term Art. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • WeSwinger
    Sentimentality. Preciousness. Come on people, the question is value. Is it more valuable to use a piece of land to extract X,000 barrels @ $100/barrel, or to have it 'protected'. With that money you could move the whole earthwork to a less prospective spot and build a nice Visitors' Center too.
  • I've known of the spiral jetty for some time but have never been there. I was a shell collector since childhood and in 1987 I reconnected with what we'd done to get the land from the Indians. (I was married to a Tlingit from Alaska and we were very involved in American Indian justice issues) This awareness turned me into an environmentalist instantly. So I quit shell collecting and buying right away. Now I make seashells of clay whichg I call Guiltless. I am so sad that again the oil companies hit what I hold dear. (we ran KLAM the radio station in Cordova Aalaska that's on Prince William Sound, site of the exxon valdez spill.) I would like to know more on this.
  • Ah, the elloquence of stupid piece of crap, takes me back to my art school days. The appeal of art is subjective, as is the definition of "progress". For example, desparately clinging to a doomed energy base (petroleum) which is not likely to last much longer anyways (the book "The Long Emergency" is a good place to start learning), at the expense of other more lasting institutions that can contribute long-term, hardly seems like progress to me.

    I'm not a big fan of spiral jetty either, but just because I'm not attracted to it doesn't mean I want it destroyed.

    Subjectively,
    Oscar Grimm
  • I disagree w/ the above comment, as I think the Spiral Jetty is a great work of art. I went ahead and sent an e-mail to Mr. Jemming opposing the drilling (thanks for the link, Alexander). I wonder, however, how Smithson himself would have felt about all this. The concept of entropy was central to his work.
  • no
    Unfortunately, I couldn't find an example form letter to use for showing my support for drilling for oil instead of preserving this stupid piece of crap. Enough preserving useless buildings and landmarks. You can't have progress if we hold everything back to the state it was in in 1843.
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