Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943-2020), better known by the sobriquet Ulay, was a German-born photographer and artist who in 1976 perpetrated one of the most audacious and celebrated art thefts in modern history, albeit as an act of performance art. In this rather uneven account, a triptych of that event, principal author Charney attempts to place the theft, Ulay\u2019s career, and his professional and personal relationship with fellow artist Abramovi\u0107 in the context of classical aesthetics and to assay whether the theft was in fact a crime at all, since the painting in question was returned unharmed, Ulay\u2019s political and cultural statement having been made. Including brief, meandering, and, alas, leaden accounts by Ulay and Abramovi\u0107 themselves, Charney, an art historian and personal friend, also makes a case for the \u201cBerlin lifting\u201d (as the theft was called) as an enduring work of art. Arguably, Charney interprets aesthetic ideas to validate his judgment, but he is not wholly convincing\u2014or unbiased. It\u2019s even debatable whether Ulay\u2019s famous act was genuinely significant\u2014outside a narrow, rarefied slice of the art world. Ulay himself resisted calling it art, preferring to call it an aktion (action) aimed at exposing the disconnect between what is revered as art and what is neglected in society, such as the poor or marginalized, as well as what Ulay saw as the suffocating institutionalization of art. That said, Charney cannot be faulted for adding that the theft \u201cgives us, briefly, a vision of what art can still dare to be: not just beautiful but bold, dangerous, and alive.\u201d Yet the real strength of the book\u2014a monograph, actually\u2014rests not in Charney\u2019s championing of Ulay, but in his wider historical and critical analysis.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Frank Uwe Laysiepen (1943-2020), better known by the sobriquet Ulay, was a German-born photographer and artist who in 1976 perpetrated one of the most audacious and celebrated art thefts in modern history, albeit as an act of performance art. In this rather uneven account, a triptych of that event, principal author Charney attempts to place […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5538,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5537","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5537"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5537\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5537"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5537"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}