by Paddy Johnson on March 9, 2013
Last summer, The Walker Art Center hosted “The Internet Cat Video Festival”, the most attended event in its 86 year history. It attracted some 10,000 people to their screening, press from around the world, and continues to account for more than 5 percent of the Walker’s web traffic. It also got festival organizers Scott Stulen and Katie Hill a presentation at SXSW.
“All audiences are equal” Stulen told the crowd, as he and Hill discussed the people who attended the festival. There were cat people, dog people, young people, old people. Art people, film people, and regular ol’ people. People who dressed up as cats, people who brought their cats, and according to Jezebel, even people who thought they were cats. There were a lot of people.
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by Paddy Johnson on May 30, 2011
Can any art event truly be considered complete without spotting at least one person describing themselves as “living art” while walking around naked in full body paint? Perhaps only North Americans and the British tout this ridiculous tradition because I didn’t spot any during the 40 Hour Party at Serralves over the weekend. I did however do one step better: The locally famous James Lee Byars impersonator, Carlos Lobato. This is a man who participated in the Spencer Tunnick group nude installation in Porto (read: an expensive photograph of bunch of nude people likely infront of a monument of some kind), and managed to create quite a bit of ruckus. The best account I heard was that the artist often took his own dive-like poses in Tunnick’s sea of crouched figures, though the artist has a slightly different take on the matter. According to him he just had plenty to say while the camera was off, but when the actual photographs were taken he conformed. Oh well.
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