Globetrotting

globe·trot  (glbtrt)

intr.v. globe·trot·ted, globe·trot·ting, globe·trots

To travel often and widely, especially for sightseeing.

globetrotter [ˈgləʊbˌtrɒtə]

n

a habitual worldwide traveller, esp a tourist or businessman

globetrotting  n & adj

 (http://www.thefreedictionary.com/globetrotter)

Everyday I do discovering - new words, new people, new art...

I read an interesting article in the The Times about Liverpool Biennial -

From The Times

September 16, 2006

Liverpool Biennial

Rachel Campbell-Johnston at Various venues 

A BIG question mark hangs over the city of Liverpool. It glows acidic yellow. “What does it mean?” I ask a man on the banks of the Mersey.

“It’s an art work,” he tells me. “It’s meant to make you think.”

“Make you think about what?” “About Liverpool?” he guesses. Then he laughs. “About whether it’s a city or just a building site?”

Invest in a catalogue for the Liverpool Biennial (and you will definitely need it — few conceptual pieces are self-explanatory) and you will find that the question mark is supposed to make a slightly more probing point. But visitors will understand what the man by the Mersey meant. Liverpool, as it prepares for its 800th birthday celebrations next year, and its appointment as the European Capital of Culture in the year after that, presents a landscape of muddy craters and scaffolding, of cranes and traffic cones.

The city may be in flux but its biennial has become a fixture. This is the fourth, and the core components are established. The John Moores painting prize is held at the Walker. Abstract is out. The figurative and the photorealist are in. The winner’s hallucinatory homage to Vermeer is just one of several wacky landscapes with environmental implications. 

Tate Liverpool hosts International 06. The gallery becomes a sort of conceptual playground incorporating anything from a box containing a knitted tortoise to what promises to be this year’s most controversial contribution. Teresa Margolles drips water, which has been used to wash corpses, on to a sizzling hotplate. As it evaporates spectators breathe in the vapours. International 06 artists — mostly established globetrotters — offer a chance to keep up. But Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries tries to race ahead. This year, the trend- setting show takes up residence in an experimental new arts complex in Greenland Street. It includes anything from wispy collages of paper clippings to hulking great sculptural installations. I particularly enjoyed the wit of the Rake’s Progress as retold through Yellow Pages and Katy Moran’s intriguing paintings, beautiful abstracts that looked more like Old Masters, like dark Dutch interiors or Fragonard confections.

But the real test for the art lover is: is that an art work or a civic artefact? Anything can be art from the funny smell on your hand (visit FACT) to those mysterious splashes in the basin of Albert Docks.

Don’t miss the imperial lions in their cages and the boats in the bombed-out church.

But there’s still one question mark. Why do so many conceptual pieces need such complicated screeds of explanation to support them? The city may be under construction, but art should not need a scaffolding too. 

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/article640366.ece
Reason why I copy/pasted whole article is because I should learn from those writing article how different people (talented!) express his feelings about contemporary art.
And more - it's not enough for me to read article once...I read slowly and few times.
What do I think about Liverpool Biennial and article?
First - about Biennial.
Are it is important for artist, for art students...for art lovers and arty-educated people?
Absolutely!!!
Are Biennial is important and interesting for...average, non-art-educated people, classic-conservative art educated or absolutely non-understanders of any art?
Well...my opinion - YES.

From ancient times is live and society philosophy "Bread and Circuses" and it work and today. 
People need show and culture even if they believe that they do not need.

It can be strange, puzzling, outrageous, evocative but it is always thought provoking.

Because it is contemporary art.

Liverpool Biennial, a 10-week feast of art taking place across the city centre just about everywhere.

It attract around a million visitors from all over the world who will puzzle, marvel, chuckle, gaze earnestly, or even sneer contemptuously and look "biennial-ish" at what is on offer.

And there is a lot on offer.

As a History of Art student in the city I am almost duty bound to do my best to see everything!

The Liverpool Biennial is one of the world's best-attended festivals of contemporary art. Venice, by comparison, drew just 375,702 to a record-breaking Biennale last year.

In the aftermath of its stint as European Capital of Culture, Liverpool's event has upped its game by making its sixth Biennial the largest to date. This year it offers 45 site specific commissions and more than 10 indoor exhibitions. It has a reach far beyond the walls of the city's many galleries.

And they are just the official events. 

Then there is the fringe - the Independents - which is showcasing 500 local, national and international artists in 128 events at over 60 venues across Merseyside.

Accessible public art is the mainstay of this Biennial. The most high profile works form a citywide exhibition called Touched, in which site specific art reaches out to neglected urban spaces."Too much art has succumbed to a bloodless and decorative intellectualism incapable of acting in or on the world," claims Lewis Biggs, Artistic Director of the project.

"Touched presents art with emotional impact. Art that not only can gain our attention but that can move us, motivate us, allow us to find a way to change ourselves. Art without emotional force is without intellectual power.”

The installation that has gained most publicity is Do Ho Suh’s Bridging Home, a Thai house that looks like it has dropped out of the sky and wedged itself in between two old warehouses, intended to show the clash between two cultures. His home town is Seoul, Korea and his adoptive home America and his art attempts to bridge the cultural differences between the two. This art shows how, in Seoul, a massively crowded city, it is completely acceptable to invade the private space of others.(biennial.com)

I wonder - a Thai house will be demolished and destroyed after biennial or not?

I quite like this house!

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Laura Belém’s installation is also sure to make an impression. It is in a Grade I-listed Oratory near Liverpool Cathedral. A thousand hand-blown glass bells and a 3D soundscape place the viewer in a mythical temple on an island which sinks into the sea.

Magnificent installation! Absolutely amazing and fantastic!

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 Kris Martin hangs up a seven-metre Medieval Sword of Damocles in  The Black-E

(formerly The Blackie) began with the commitment to combine a contemporary arts centre with a community centre. When - having taken over the former Great George Street Congregational Church in October 1967 with the support of Peter (now Sir Peter) Moores - the team of artists led by Wendy and Bill Harpe began their cultural adventures with long term aims and with an 'open door' policy. And what might have seemed almost fortuitous at the time of the public launch in May 1968 can now be seen as essential ingredients in determining the character of the U.K.'s first community arts project, and in creating a centre where all the arts (performing and making, experimental and traditional) might engage with all the people who chose to come through the doors (young and old, disadvantaged and privileged).(http://www.theblack-e.co.uk/content/about-us)
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Alfredo Jaar creates a red-themed lounge where you can re-evaluate Marx in the old Rapid Store. But I still remember ...how Marxism-Leninism Room in my soviet school looks like...it's absolutely not like that!!!