Big Eye

Tony Tasset - Eye (installed at Pritzker Park, Chicago) 2010

I made it down to Tony Tasset's eye yesterday. I had heard and read a lot about it. I was impressed - it is a spectacle. Lots of people where taking photos of it and it was 7pm on a Thursday (not peak tourist time). I was first struck by the size, then thoughts on big brother/all seeing eye/eye of Sauron/God, but then I was reminded of the film Amélie when Nino was following clues to get his photo books back. - He comes to a man mimicing a bronze statue that is pointing. A child next to man says, "Only a fool looks at the finger." Nino then looks to where the finger is pointing and sees Amélie putting his photo book into his scooter. - I turned around to see where the eye was looking; to see what could be so worthy of such a huge critical gaze... and saw only the intersection of State and Van Buren and a section of the loop. I think a big opportunity for commentary was lost here, but given the location I'm not sure what would be the best gazing point: Harold Washington Library? Robert Morris College? Barnes & Noble? Maybe it's just looking at us.
At any rate I do admire the amount of public draw this piece has. Tasset says himself in this Tribune article,

"I'm an artist that's shown in galleries, and occasionally museums, and I've made all kinds of different work, some of it very exclusive," he said. "But these public works … suddenly to try to make a work which sort of addressed everybody, was weirdly freeing for me. It was like I came to a point, maybe sometime in my early 40s, where I thought, I just don't think it's good enough to say, 'Oh, you all are idiots. Here's my art: Take it or leave it.' I just thought that somehow, even if I, as an artist, liked it, that just wasn't a satisfactory answer." He said his goal as a public artist is to make work that both appeals to "intellectuals" and speaks to a wider audience. "With every piece," he said, "I'm always negotiating how much the audience can handle — what they like, what they don't like."

As further example, it was #3 on the Yahoo 'trending' list today. Evidently Gaga and Rachel Maddow are more popular now, not bad.