D.C. scraps climate art installation, says it sends the wrong message

[n2doc]

Artist Mia Feuer’s planned “ANTEDILUVIAN” art installation — a gas station mostly submerged underwater in Washington, D.C., as a statement on climate change and rising sea levels — is officially cancelled completely. Months of anticipation for Feuer’s proposed project were dashed last Friday when the D.C. Commission for the Arts and Humanities announced that ANTEDILUVIAN couldn’t be installed in Kingman Lake, by the Anacostia River, where Feuer had initially hoped to place it.

“After further consultation with the District’s Department of the Environment regarding the city’s on-going efforts to clean up the Anacostia River, DCCAH is working to relocate the temporary project outside of the Anacostia River and vicinity,” a spokesperson for the Arts Commission said.

But Feuer wrote on her Indiegogo blog this morning that her installation won’t be relocated anywhere, and that it was permanently banned from happening. It was supposed to be part of DC’s 5×5 Festival, a program the city’s arts commission is kicking off this fall with five noted curators picking 25 artists to feature public arts projects around the District – similar to Art Basel in Miami or Prospect in New Orleans.

But Feuer told me today that the arts commission had dropped ANTEDILUVIAN completely, even though hers was one of the highest profiled projects in the festival.

more
http://grist.org/climate-energy/d-c-scraps-climate-art-installation-says-it-sends-the-wrong-message/

In a few decades that will be the reality, not an art piece.

[DirkGently]

1. Something doesn't add up here ...

From a "Coalition" supposedly dedicated to protecting the nearby river:

If the public misunderstands the art’s intended message as permission to put gas or oil in the river, the project could single-handedly set back the river restoration and undo years of effort on the part of the DC, Montgomery County and Prince Georges County governments to convince people to keep oil out of the water.

No one would think that a depiction of a flooded gas station was "permission to put gas or oil in the river."

That is insane nonsense. Something else is going on.