Colorful Crystals in Macau (梳打埠之幻彩水晶)

Have been working fairly hard recently. So I took some time off to visit Macau. I enjoy the more leisiurely pace there, especially on week days. The annual national long holidays in the PRC over, Macau has reverted to its more civilized rhythm. I had lots of surprises though, from this sleepy neighbor of ours at the mouth of the Pearl River Estuary. Although I had been there a number of times, I never really took a good look at MGM. This time, I did. I was dazzled.

I discovered these ceiling lights in the reception hall of MGM, done by or under the direction of the famous blown glass artist from America,Dale Chihuly originally from Tacoma, Washington who studied glass making in Venice in 1968, got a MA in Fine Arts at the Rhode Island School of
Design. In 1971, with the support of John Hauberg and Anne Gould
Hauberg, Chihuly cofounded the Pilchuck Glass School near Stanwood,
Washington. Since having a traffic accident in 1976 in England and lost his left eye and then dislocated his
right shoulder in a 1979 bodysurfing accident, he started hiring others to do the relevant work and describes himself as more a choreographer and director than a dancer or actor. He is now an extremely rich guy with sales of his works to be counted in tens of millions US each year and has enormously successful permanent collections of his work in various states of America, England, United Arab Emirates, Singapore and now Macau.  Having seen it, I think I know why.

Corridor where the crystals are displayed

Work in yellow, orange and green

Simple bowls and plates in yellow

Work in yellow with simple flowing lines

bowls within bowls

Work in green

Part of another work in green

Another shell like bowl

Another view of the bowl

Detail of the the bowl

More detail of the bowl

Some blue cabbages?

A blue and green blow with gold linings

Details of the bowl

Simpler blue bowls within bowls

details of such bowl collection

Bowls in orange

From blue to orange

Details of the orange bowls

A striped transparent flower with spherical bowl and ivory spirals



detail of the bowl with spiral

Close up of the tip of the spiral

Details of another bowl in yellow, green and orange

Art appears commercialized now. Has art become a commodity? Does art require more concepts than skills? If so, have they become detachable components in the world of capitalist production and marketing?Is the blurring of boundaries not typical of the world of post-modernity, post-Freudianism, post-structuralist and phenomenological flatness and époché of late capitalism? Have we now entered into the era where image is king, where the media is the message, where past and present, where different cultures and different aspects of the same culture, where the vertical and the horizontal, where production and consumption, where the interior and the exterior have become merged or are merely juxtaposed in the equalization and standardization of all values, where everything is finally reduced to mere images, images of images, where representation of the so-called "real" has completely disappeared, where the simulacra have replaced the signs and the symbols, and all that we have is the infinite jouissance of the play of surfaces and where all we've got left is the endless and ever accelerating narcissistic repetition and infinite self-replication or ritornello or refrain of the same themes, motifs of the virtual, where the surfaces have become folded, refolded or are folding, refolding or unfolding into each other until we can no longer tell where the interior and where the exterior is, where speed and momentum has replaced weight and direction, where the only meaning is the meaninglessness of meaning, where space has conquered time and everything and everyone is caught in the vortices created by waves upon waves of mass consumption. What is commodity?  What is art? Does it matter?