Artifactitude

There is, reputedly, a greater density of art galleries and museums in Sante Fe than in New York City. Moreover, entry to all of the galleries in the centre of Sante Fe is completely free on a Friday night. It was for this reason, then, that I paid full admission to gain entry to the New Mexico Museum of Art last Sunday.

The museum itself is a stunning mock-adobe construction, and currently houses several interesting exhibitions, including Flux, a collection of glass sculptures. This really appealed to me, because in such sculpture, the art is so clearly built upon the craft, and one cannot imagine being able to produce such works oneself without a degree of learning and dedication.

As ever, I was amused by some of expository captions which accompanied the exhibits. One such explained that whilst many glass sculptures attempt to mimic other artifacts, there is an alternative trend in which the sculpture adopts the attitude of being an artifact in itself, an attitude which it dubbed 'artifactitude'. A further caption spoke of a nascent tendency for glass sculptors to produce works which are not vessels, but, rather, anti-vessels. Sadly, no definition was furnished of what an anti-vessel is, but perhaps the answer lies with this paper by Hans Halvorson and David Baker on the concept of antimatter.