Aerge to Walk

Cathy Fox sends out an email every time her site is updated so I only look at perhaps 1% of the material. It is the blog that cried wolf. I had the misfortune to read her alert about urban hikes as art this morning.

In a symbolic reclamation of Atlanta for pedestrians, Stuart Keeler will walk from Midtown to I-285 in each of three performances on December 16, 18 and 21. You are invited to join him. Dressed in primary colors, armed with maps and his cell-phone GPS system, the Atlanta artist (and co-founder of Le Flash) will depart at 9 a.m. on the appointed days at the intersection of Peachtree Street and Ponce de Leon Avenue.

It seems typically suburban-millennial to not recognize that the ‘piece’ you are doing was done 50 years ago in Paris, to not recognize the preposterousness of reclaiming the city streets when your carrying of a gps device is an outright admission that you still fear them, that the thousands of people you champion with far less idle time who make such pedestrian/public transit jaunts every day because they are forced to will either know nothing about what you are doing or would think you were a fool for walking to the perimeter if you didn’t have to, and that the other idle people whose interest might be piqued by your work will never have an interest in reclaiming the streets that they will have to share with the former group. I see this being about as well thought out as your standard balloon-boy, sex-tape, party-crashing ‘happening’ that relies on the notion that if you tell someone about something you are doing loud enough they will find it interesting. i guess that has always been the mo of the art community. i dont know, maybe his drawings will be fresh.