Thursday, August 1, 2013

The Art of the Brick: Nathan Sawaya, Lego Artist

Okay, so, if you go to Discovery Times Square, you can shell out a pretty steep sum of cash to see a couple of different types of exhibits, which might take you about an hour to go through.  We're talking 25 bucks, basically, more than a movie, but less than a Broadway show. 

We went to see the artwork of Nathan Sawaya, a corporate lawyer who eventually quit his day job and began to create interesting works of art, from Lego bricks. 

The self-congratulatory video introduction to the exhibit impresses with his fame: he's been on lots of tv shows and met many a big shot.  His theme is that we all need creativity in our lives; it is essential for our happiness.   (His message is so very bourgeois, with the kind of platitudes you find watching pre-school television.) 

The exhibit itself is actually pretty cool. The first room you enter is his "history of art" room.  He's got a bunch of noted works of art from a diverse range of history and culture.  While the selections are obvious: -- Munch's scream, Rodin's thinker, Michelangelo's David, Grant Wood's farmers, Whistler's mother, Vermeer's girl with the Lego pearl earring -- it's still pretty damn impressive that he could create this stuff with the same pieces of plastic my kids have in their basement.  (Okay, but in the video, it looks like he coats some of the pieces with glue.  If I'm right, isn't that cheating?)

As we get to a room of his original pieces, we get these little messages in them.  "Overcome" shows a man climbing to the top of a wall, having succeeded with much effort.  The placard explaining the work really hits the reader over the head with its message about attaining success.  I found those explanations incredibly obvious and either condescending or really child-ish, in the sense that they could have been said by a child.  I'd have rather just had the art and gone, cool, and then go home. 

The final room was what we came for:  the room exhibiting contest winners.  My oldest made a really cool piece that I would not dare describe for fear of getting it wrong, but she was chosen months ago to have the Lego art in the exhibit, and it was really fun seeing her work on display.  the other kids' stuff was pretty cool, but I'm partial. 

The other really great thing about her winning was that she got six complimentary tickets to the exhibit for having her sculpture chosen! So it only cost us the price of one for seven of us.  I sure as hell would not have paid full price for this guy's stuff.  It's neat, it's cool, but indeed his homages to the great masterworks do reveal how brilliant the best of those works really are, and how limited in vision his Lego works are. 

Maybe i'm just in a bit of a cranky mood.  I keep thinking of child brides in Yemen, and I think: yes, lawyer Sawaya, children need to be creative, but they also need to be not getting married at ten.  But what the hey. 

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