{"id":5330,"date":"2013-08-14T08:27:35","date_gmt":"2013-08-14T14:27:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5330"},"modified":"2013-08-14T08:27:35","modified_gmt":"2013-08-14T14:27:35","slug":"the-giants-of-boston","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5330","title":{"rendered":"The Giants of Boston"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"http:\/\/thenewinquiry.com\/essays\/giants-of-boston\/\">MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Boston is a city perennially self-conscious about public art. A 2012 Boston Phoenix cover story examined why such an alarming number of young artists leave a city ranked in the top 10 for national arts funding. (The Boston Phoenix itself folded not long after that publication.) When it comes to large-scale works in the public domain, the city tends to favor exogenous creations rather than the homegrown. The accusation that the city is risk-averse and WASP-y descends from what Michael Braithwaite called an \u201cage-old attitude central to the very culture of Boston itself: a city where philanthropy as historically been dedicated to institutions and fine art, rather than to visual art and artists that push boundaries.\u201d More important, the elimination of rent control by voter referendum in 1994 ensured that tenable housing for artists, the vast majority of whom piece together low wages, would be dispiritingly low.This essay appears in TNI Vol. 19: \u201cArt,\u201d out now. Subscribe for $2 and get it. <\/p>\n<p>The most publicly discussed artwork on the heels of that 2012 report was \u201cThe Giant of Boston,\u201d a large mural by Os G\u00eameos (Portuguese for \u201cthe twins\u201d). Ot\u00e1vio and Gustavo Pandolfo are Brazilian brothers from S\u00e3o Paulo who co-produce all their work, both sanctioned and illicit, as the eponymous twins, signing their entire jointly bred oeuvre as a single artist. Os G\u00eameos\u2019 local work comprised three murals around the city and an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the most prominent artistic institution in Boston.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI: Boston is a city perennially self-conscious about public art. A 2012 Boston Phoenix cover story examined why such an alarming number of young artists leave a city ranked in the top 10 for national arts funding. (The Boston Phoenix itself folded not long after that publication.) When it comes to large-scale works [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}