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HUMOR IN ARTand Architecture

(shortened version)

by Don L. F. Nilsen

and Alleen Pace Nilsen

Public Art: A Cockney in London

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Escher SketchA Parody of Art

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Picasso and Rhodan

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HUMOROUS ARCHITECTURE• In Time magazine’s 1997 year-end summary of the

“best” and the “worst” accomplishments, editors devoted a half-page to a twilight photo of the New York New York hotel, advertised as “the Greatest City in Las Vegas.” They wrote:

• “O.K., it’s a hoot, a building that’s made to look like a jumble of buildings. This massive Las Vegas hotel with a ‘Central Park-themed’ casino takes as its silhouette the Manhattan skyline and for good measure crams in Grant’s Tomb, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Did we mention the Coney Island roller coaster?”

• “Tasteless, you say? We say, beyond tasteless.”

New York, New Yorkin Las Vegas, Nevada

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Here is another wonderful example of humor in architecture—Tempe’s Upside

Down Pyramid built for our City Hall.

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Here’s an example of a waterfall that serves as its own source.

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His reptiles appear to crawl off the page and change into living creatures.

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Self Portrait, Escher Style

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SALVADOR DALI (1904-1989)He depicted dream worlds in which commonplace objects were juxtaposed, deformed, or metamorphosed into bizarre

and irrational distortions.

Notice how the perspective changes when the picture is viewed from the side.

• At the same time Dali was distorting objects, he was filling them with realistic details and placing them into bleak, sunlit landscapes reminiscent of his Catalonian homeland.

• From this angle we are less likely to recognize the people sitting in the sand.

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Impressionism: Van Gogh’s Starry Night

and David Wiesner’s Art and Max

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ExpressionismEdvard Munch’s “The Scream” and Keane’s “Big Eyes”

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Abstrace ExpressionismJackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper)

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MinimalismBrancusi’s “Bird in Flight”

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Maximalism (Gothic Cathedral)

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Dadaism or “Found” ArtDu Champs’s “Fountain”

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Realism: Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want”

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In Conclusion, Le Louvre: A Story

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• A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from Le Louvre.

• He stole the paintings and put them in his van, but his van ran out of gas.

• When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such a stupid mistake, he replied:

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I had no Monet

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To buy Degas

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To make the Van Gogh

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I figured I had nothing Toulouse

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…and I had De Gaulle to try it.