The Making of the Piano Bar Landscape, Art, and Discourse in Biscayne Bay.

This paper focuses on a peculiar event that occurred in Biscayne Bay in January 2011, when a grand piano appeared on a sandbar 200 yards (183 m) east of Miami Shores, Florida. After several days, a teen-aged art college applicant revealed to the press that he had placed the piano there as a piece of art. News coverage of the event shows that the mysterious placement of the piano on the sandbar was not universally appreciated, but was viewed as a highly controversial and provocative act relating to cultural discourses of nature and art, authority, public space, and transgression. The event provides an example of the ways in which the media designate events as noteworthy and influence the representation of places and people's relationships to them. Drawing upon the long-established links between art and geography, this paper discusses the piano bar in terms of the potential for intersections of modern art and geography to alter ordinary perceptions and experiences of everyday places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]