29 Replies to “The Art World’s Answer To The Dustpan”

  2. People are free to patronize the the most mediocre attempts at “art?” as long as it’s on their own dime.
    Seeing how I was not forced to pay for this monstrosity, I say let a million junk art lovers fall in and fill the crack…stupidity leads a vast army.
    Maybe the same artist will create a cliff for junk art lemmings to leap from…call it Darwin’s revenge.

  3. This is almost as good as the National Gallery’s stripes. Three people fell in to the thing at the opening.
    “One observer said: “Instead of art imitating life, here it’s threatening life.””
    BWAHAHA!!!!
    I’ve got a tangle of jagged metal around here someplace. Wonder if I could get Doris Salcedo to sell it to somebody for a couple hundred grand? Hell, I’d even sharpen it for her!

  4. Wow, that’s deep. I’m surprised Yoko Ono didn’t come up with it first. But at least it won’t attract flies like a dress of rotting steak.

  5. WLMR: You or I didn’t pay for this crap this but we paid $M for the Barnett Newman 3 stripes painting in the National Gallery. Not content with 1 the experts bought 5.

  6. The blame has to be placed on the gallery management who have allowed themselves to be fleeced. However, ultimately, we are all paying for this scam, a scam that emerges within the fraudulence of postmodernism, which says that whatever one personally says, is truth.
    So, if I say that I am an artist and what I produce is ‘art’ – that is then received as truth.
    I’m sure everyone is familiar with the famous hoax by a physicist, Sokal, who wrote an article filled with scientific nonsense, liberally sprinkled with postmodern rhetoric – and it was published in the journal Social Text. Same thing.
    And our own National Gallery a few years back paid several million for three stripes of roller-paint on a canvas. We paid for that.
    In a small ‘sculpture garden’ near where I live, ‘artists’ regularly put up their taxpayer funded outdoor exhibits, each more inane in my view than the last. One was a brick wall. That’s all. Another was a panel with stripes that electronically changed from vertical to horizontal. And so on.
    When nature creates potholes and cracks in the pavement, we demand repairs; when someone selfdefines themself as an artist and does the same and calls it art – we pay them. Hmm.

  8. Newsflash: A contractor was arrested today for a serious act of vandalism at the Tate Modern. He was patching a crack in the floor responsible for tripping his wife.

  10. I don’t know what’s more disturbing – that so much money was paid to put a structural flaw in the floor of the gallery to illustrate some trite metaphor, or that there are people who’ve so come to distrust their senses that they’ll step into a huge crack on purpose.

  12. Back when Voice of Fire was first purchased and there was a big uproar, the National Gallery put out a pamphlet to explain the meaning of the painting.
    I wish I kept that brochure – it was 2-3 pages of supreme hilarity.
    I hope someone apllies some crack filler to that Tate “installation.”

  13. No Sean – all you need to do is stop taking those purty pitchers of landscapes and instead train your lens on the most mundane, yet painstakingly staged, scenario you can imagine. And blow it up to double life-sized. Or convince hundreds of exhibitionists to get nude in a public place and take snapshots. Or take blurry photos of your own bunghole. I can already hear the anticipatory hum of the Canada Council.

  14. I usually don’t care for conceptual art but I find this piece has some potency because of what it is supposed to represent as posed so coyly by the creator.
    It represents the divide between Islam and Europe or as the article reads…” the division problem of integrating immigrants into European society” At 550 feet it is hard to miss the incongruity and truth behind it’s meaning. They should also say it will be easier to heal the breach at the Tate than the other bridgeless chasm.

  15. Shades of the “Voice of Fire” for those Canadians with a long memory. But what does that voice actually say?
    “You got burned, Canada!”

  17. Re: Salcedo
    There was an artist named Salcedo,
    Who was looking for a viable placebo,
    So she cut a groove in the floor, locked the door,
    And yelled, “I’m falling in the hands of libido.”

  18. The growing crack in my garage represents the cry for individual commitment, effort and sacrifice to rise up out of the common draining oppressiveness of Monday Night Football and Hockey Night in Canada to bridge the gap between the right and left sides with a smooth solid permanent solution.
    I shouldn’t have to disturb such a perfect work in progress for some years to come…whew.

  19. Evidently the application of Critical Theory to the practice of art doesn’t just cause headaches for art students, it’s downright dangerous to less observant gallery patrons. Still, I think this sort of old fashioned avant garde shtick is rather comforting; it’s a bit like schlepping around the house on the weekend in a Che Guevara t-shirt listening to Psychedelic Sunday on the radio. 1968: that was a year, eh?

  21. You know when I first saw the crack, I thought it was a painting like those sidewalk paintings that have a 3D effect. Having people try to avoid the crack only to realize it was only a painting but nooooo, the “artist” isn’t even that clever. Sad really, next thing you know the Goracle will win a Nobel Prize…
    BTW, The photographs of masses of nude people was kind of unique and had (in my humble opinion) some merit originally, but to do the same thing or variations ad nausium makes it get old pretty fast.
    BTW part deux, forget Canada Council if you are from out west. It is purely a “Canadian” thing (read Ontario east).

  22. Stuff like this is one reason I’ve had very little to do with “art” for most of my life. The only thing this piece demonstrates is the ability of an “artist” to con very gullible people out of $595,000. If I want to see a large crack in the ground, I’ll visit the Grand Canyon.
    The stories of people falling in remind me of an incident that almost happened at a pottery exhibition I went to about 20 years ago. In addition to nicely thrown pieces of pottery there were very oddly shaped lumps of clay which I presume had artistic merit to someone. While looking at the exhibits I came across what appeared to be a cardboard box full of crumpled newsprint in my path. Assuming it was used to pack some of the pieces on display I was just about to kick it out of my path when at the last millisecond I realized that it was a ceramic “sculpture”. I suppose there is some skill required to create and fire thin sheets of clay that ressemble newsprint, but it struck me as a singularly useless piece of pottery. Even so, it was orders of magnitude closer to art than a crack in the floor.

  23. If you suck at the teat of the Canada Council, you are not an artist, you are a talk artist. Thats like being an artist on welfare. And paradoxically enough, they are the ones that get the nod of the current naked Emperors. Only time and a true artists work survives.

  24. “and instead train your lens on the most mundane, yet painstakingly staged, scenario you can imagine”
    Stephen Harper’s hairdo?!?
    “Or take blurry photos of your own bunghole.”
    How about I arrange some bacon into a happy face, snap a pic, and call it Mohammed? Think that’ll get me a Canada Council grant?

  27. Speaking as the girl in her third year of Art School: No. Just no. Not art. Not cool. Not worth that much by a long shot.
    I’m so glad I’m not a post-modernist. Ugh.
    I think Art should involve thought. Not tripping.
    (It was nice to meet you today at the SaskBlogs meeting…)

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