On Friday, there will be a high point of a street party Friday where guests will pay $1,000 each to wear their pajamas to the benefit for the 21C Museum Foundation that operates the hotel's contemporary art museum. The event is what Austrian artist Werner Reiterer calls a "soft intervention" the rest of us might call an animated streetlight.

Reiterer will get everyone's attention with the surprise of humorous, human-operated works such as twirling lampposts, boxes of bouncing balls, breathing chandeliers or flags that seem independently motivated to fly up and down a flagpole.

It may sound surrealist, serious absurdity is something Reiterer and several generations of European and American artists inherited through German combat pilot, medical student and artist Joseph Beuys, who thought of art as "actions" and social reform.

By M. Sese
http://www.jump2top.com