Peace doves
Sep. 15th, 2024 12:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
After the Museum of the Moon, after a visit from Gaia, this summer Durham Cathedral has played host to a flock of Peace Doves.
Artist Peter Walker invited people - community groups and incividual volunteers - to write a message on a paper dove, then strung them together to make his installation. There's a lot about this process which arouses my prejudices: I've nothing against community involvement as an end in itself, but it's about the process not the outcome - I'm not more likely to admire the result because the artist has farmed the work out to other people. And I'm not against peace: who is? This is just a way of side-dtepping criticism, isn't it:but it's in a good cause...
You can't criticise art unless you've seen it, though. So in the last few days available, we caught the cathedral bus and went to have a look. And while I can't say I was moved by it, it was very pretty:
The BBC report linked above mentions music: I did not hear any music. But I quite liked the effect of the mass of doves, and the way they were fromed by the cathedral. I thought, in fact, that, unlike those Luke Jerram globes, this was a piece which had been devised for this space, and it wasn't until I came to write this post that I discovered a description on the artirt's website of his Doves of Peace installation at Liverpool Cathedral.
Artist Peter Walker invited people - community groups and incividual volunteers - to write a message on a paper dove, then strung them together to make his installation. There's a lot about this process which arouses my prejudices: I've nothing against community involvement as an end in itself, but it's about the process not the outcome - I'm not more likely to admire the result because the artist has farmed the work out to other people. And I'm not against peace: who is? This is just a way of side-dtepping criticism, isn't it:
You can't criticise art unless you've seen it, though. So in the last few days available, we caught the cathedral bus and went to have a look. And while I can't say I was moved by it, it was very pretty:
The BBC report linked above mentions music: I did not hear any music. But I quite liked the effect of the mass of doves, and the way they were fromed by the cathedral. I thought, in fact, that, unlike those Luke Jerram globes, this was a piece which had been devised for this space, and it wasn't until I came to write this post that I discovered a description on the artirt's website of his Doves of Peace installation at Liverpool Cathedral.