in Baltimore each summer. Here in grad school I’m a rare defender of Artscape. Folks complain because it invades our sacred creative bubble. It’s crass, it’s commercial. It also gets people out walking around, looking at art, swinging on tire swings, and listening to music.
This year the art was pushed to the edges of the ‘scape.
Instead of public sculpture, Mt. Royal Avenue was lined with sausage stands. At the northern end, the “Target Family Experience Tent” let kids and parents sit down and make stuff. At the southern end, the Rabbit Hole exhibition also catered to kids and families, purposefully and with a great deal of twisted creativity. But the overall result was to infantilize art making as an activity to distract children while the adults ate $6 plates of french fries.
That said, if you went exploring you could find DJs, a Gamelan orchestra, and 10-year-old musicians wailing free jazz (thanks to the High Zero Foundation). On the Charles Street Bridge, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society mounted an attack somewhere between a renaissance fair and a GWAR concert. This kind of DIY anarchy is Baltimore’s stock-in-trade. It used to be a hallmark of Artscape, and like the stubborn smell of fried dough, hopefully the ever growing arts festival won’t be able to shake it off.
