Entrepreneurial Art of Christo & Jeanne-Claude

Entrepreneurial Art of Christo & Jeanne-Claude
-Courtesy of Alain de Botton’s School of Life-

HIGHLIGHT

The Bulgarian artist Christo, together with his partner Jeanne-Claude, showed the world what public art could be....

The Bulgarian artist Christo, together with his partner Jeanne-Claude, showed the world what public art could be. Of all the work that made Christo and Jeanne-Claude the most famous installation artists of the past fifty years, none still exists. They wrapped the Reichstag, hung a curtain over a valley, placed giant umbrellas across a Japanese mountainside, enclosed some islands in Florida and in general proved that art doesn't have to be a small object on a wall; it can be a force that reshapes the whole world.

Surrounded Islands by Christo & Jeanne-Claude(artistsforkids.blogspot.com)

“Traditionally, artists made small, lovely things. They laboured to render a few square inches of canvas utterly perfect or to chisel a single bit of stone into its most expressive form. For several centuries, the most common size for art was between three and six feet across. And while artists were articulating their visions across such expanses, the large scale projects were given over wholesale to governments and private developers – who generally operated with much lower ambitions. Governments and the free market made big ugly things rather often…”

The wrapped Reichstag. / http://changehere.wordpress.com//

It also shows Christo creating the preparatory materials that made their work possible, not only in that they presented the visions of the wrapped-up pieces of infrastructure or valleys full of umbrellas to come, but that the sale of the plans and drawings financed the process of making those visions real.

☆Donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/artlecture

Watch more films on ART/ARCHITECTURE in our playlist: https://bit.ly/2XTKFF5