Is it true? Not really. Is it hilarious and timely? Of course so.
Yardbombing, which Philly.com referred to as "Granny vandalism," is what happens when your knitting hobby turns into an addiction. When your friends, family, and your clowder of cats say, "enough, already, I don't need anymore socks!"
It's harmless, even kind of cute before it gets all soggy and gross. But Philebrity pointed out the one line in the video that stuck in my farm-raised crawl: "I really like...putting art in places where there isn't art."
Like...nature?
This is a blog about architecture, one that often delves into art. Do you know the one and only thing I love more than architecture and art? A complete absence of any of it. The woods, a meadow of wildflowers, and in urban areas, places like Morris Arboretum that briefly take me back to the Shenandoah Valley.
Melissa Haims' Wrapped Up is whimsical, fun, and probably cathartic like most crafts. But the definition of art has become so abstract that literally anything not created by Mother Nature passes as art: strikers, tags, a menstrual cycle, barf.
To quote Sir Gerald Moore take on art in the unappreciated movie adaptation of Bonfire of the Vanities, "in my house, when a turd appears, we throw it out. We dispose of it. We flush it away. We don't put it on the table and call it caviar." Or 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy, "We know what art is: it's paintings of horses!"
Yarnbomb all you want. If someone calls it art, it's art. Like the quilted pattern on a roll of paper towels or a 1992 Toyota Camry, someone designed it. But let's keep it in the arboretum, on lampposts, and bike racks; and not "where there isn't any art." Because there is art there, designed by someone more resilient than a thousand DiVinci's, and you'll see that resilience when Mother Nature reclaims herself, and the yarn begins to mold.
