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in reply to @AutomaticTiger's post:
It is appropriate that it is infested with nightmare monsters because that is what it feels like every time someone mentions it in art school
It's less that it's bad, and more that if you were in an art class, your literal definition of Baby Boomer art professor got their mind blown by it in the 1970s and keeps holding up as an example of transgressive and totally original art. Which it may well have been at the time! But it was also forty years old and counting when I was in art school and that was ten years ago. And you heard about it in every single fine art class. All of them. It's amazing how many people I know who survived The Art Gauntlet all have this specific memory of being told endlessly about The Spiral Jetty.
There are reasons why specifically earth works annoy me, even as a Dada and abstract art appreciator, but a lot of it is petty and about arts funding and who gets to make art and at it's base it's just "Oh, it's the fucking Spiral Jetty again" lol
It was the opposite for me; while slogging through the five hundred works I had to memorize by artist, date and medium for one of multiple art history courses, Spiral Jetty jumped out at me as being wholly unlike all the paintings and sculpture I was being buried under. It piqued my interest. I wanted to know what this was about. And then after months of cubism and abstract expressionism and assemblage and pop, we finally get to the present, and Spiral Jetty is never discussed! The prof flashes a slide, lets us write down the info, and that's it! You want answers? FORGET ABOUT IT! it's like the fuckin' finale of Lost!
I'm beginning to think there are two factions of aged art professor who hate each other and are polarized about whether they tell you earthworks exist or not. There is probably something to be learned about contemporary art movements here, but I'm far too removed from art academia now to know what it is.
[audience] yeahhhh!!!! we love it!!!!!! give us lightning field by walter de maria!!!!!!!
i distinctly remember my first and only time seeing the spiral jetty and thinking "that's it?"