Dale Chihuly battle

Has anyone been following this lawsuit?? Interesting stuff.
Here is one link but there is quite a bit out there regarding this case.

http://www.sptimes.com/2006/06/11/Floridian/Glass_warfare.shtml

I think they all look like jellyfish. I’m sick of humans stealing ideas from other lifeforms and making money on them. These artists should be forced to live with jellyfish permanently stuck to their sides as punishment. To think otherwise is to be anti-jellite.

I find his work to be pretty interesting, but he has the world’s most unbelievably overblown ego.

I saw an exhibit of his stuff in Toronto once, and picked up a free DVD about his methods, et cetera. The thing that struck me the most were:

  • screaming at apprentices (who, incidentally, do a lot of “his” work) that they weren’t doing things properly, then smashing their stuff
  • screaming at the people hanging his things in venice that they weren’t in the right place
  • after the exhibition, smashing all the art (which was in a dumpster) into tiny bits, so that no one could take it home or display it

Not the nicest guy, so I don’t have any interest in him coming out of this lawsuit happy. There’s a perfectly valid market in “ripping off” designs, especially when it’s ART, in order to sell to the people who want the look of expensive stuff but can’t afford it. The defendant isn’t selling his art as Chihuly ™, so he really has no case at all.

He’s just an incredibly stuck-up, bitter man who doesn’t understand how human society works.

This seems like to people struggling with a personal conflict not an artisitic one. I have seen some of these larger pieces and in my opinion they are all about as unique (and as similar) as snowflakes.

There is a real richness to his work, which I like a lot; there was a particularly good installation by him which spanned all of the Kew Botanical Gardens in London last year, where he installed thousands of pieces in the glass houses, on the lake, surrounded by tropical plants etc. His work may be all the same, shallow (and possibly a rip off of someone else…), but it is nevertheless very visually pleasing.

http://www.circaglass.co.uk/phdi/p2.nsf/imgpages/circa_ckew4.jpg/$file/ckew4.jpg

Oh, I agree that his art is quite beautiful. The issues I was pointing out are that his work isn’t actually made by his own hand (a huge issue I don’t really care to get into), and that he’s got one hell of a chip on his shoulder, which may be blowing the seriousness way out of hand.

It is pretty (and pretty overpriced) stuff though.

Few of the great painters did more than apply a few brush strokes to their own paintings. They laid them out and had teams of apprentices do the work. Henry Moore and Rodin had most of their work done by assistants. Glass blowing cannot be done alone, especially at this scale, it requires a director of sorts. IT is only in modern times that the notion of a “starving artist” who suffers for his work and toils to no end became popular. I have no issue that he doesn’t do the stuff himself. By the way, the loss of his eye limits his depth perception and prevents him from working the glass directly anymore.

Personally I’m not big on the work, it just has so much of a post modern feel to it. I like his installation work a lot better, like the Ice wall he did in Israel that lasted several days in the hot sun, slowly melting. The instalation in London looked like it was awesome, really beautiful.

I had the rare opportunity to meet Chihuly when I was a freshman in college. He was classmates with one of my drawing instructors, Creighton Michaels, and Creighton brought him in to show his work to the class and meet the students. Unfortunately I was like Dale who? And didn’t maximize the moment, but he seemed pretty cool, pretty laid back, and rightfully proud of what he has done.

…but none of this bares on the legal issues…

This dude was Chihuly’s right hand man for years, Chihuly helped him set up his own shop, and gave him freelance work. Then this guy decides to partner with another glass blower and sell the secrets Dale developed? Even naming pieces with the same tittles??? Seems pretty open and shut to me…

Looks to me like the same titles are “bowl”, “plate”…

Ah well.

I was referring more to the series names like Ikebana and Sea Forms…