Accidental Cleanliness Destroys $1.1m Art Installation

[Veylon]

IMO: Regardless of whether it was "art" or not (impossible to prove), the fault lies with the museum. If an object, especially one insured for that much money, is in a public space, the least they can do is erect a barrier and instruct staff to stay outside it. Tell them to report any damage to artwork rather than interfering, so that it can be professionally restored. I imagine that's what they do in classical art galleries.

Or the company contracted to do the cleaning. There ought to have been a lecture/film on "If You See Damaged Art". Part of the appeal of this type of art is being able to walk up to and around it and see it from many points of view, so I don't know if a barrier would be practical.

But that's the practical side of things. Personally, as far as I'm concerned, the vast majority of modern art is dreck and will be as forgotten as the knightly literature that Cervantes mocked. Modern Art is today's equivalent of Renaissance plays that involved thousands of swans or Napolean III's aluminum tableware or the Hawaiian chiefs' feathered cloaks. It's a way for the absurdly wealthy to demonstrate their resources by throwing money away on something rare and useless.

That's all well and good, but I do object to taxpayer money being spent on this stuff. When there's billions in private cash flying around, there's no need for the government to move in and support it.

 

[Krion_Vark]

I don't know.

I'd certainly throw that piece of crap away.

Art my arse.

Lets be honest here if you saw that in the middle of an art gallery you would know that it was not garbage. Its not like the thing was sitting on the side of the road or anything. It doesnt matter what it looks like if you see a very large strange thing in the middle of an art gallery anybody with half a brain should instantly realise its not garbage. Wether or not we think it is art is really not an issue because of the location that it was in.

Its not that she didn't think it was an art piece. Its that she mistook the "dried rain water" in the bin as dirt on the piece and so cleaned it off.

 

[userwhoquitthesite]

snip

You can be wrong all you like. Piling a bunch of garbage together and pretending it stands for something isn't art.

We can argue about it all day long, but come sundown, I will still be vehemently opposed to the notion that a bit of flotsam washed up on a beach should be hung in an art gallery, and you will still be just as adamant in your belief in the legitimacy of modern art. So instead of continuing to fight about it, I'm going to make a grilled cheese sandwich and play Shadow of the Colossus.

I recommend this course of action for everyone in the thread, except those allergic to dairy, or ideologically opposed to playing games about thieves who stab giants in the face to bring people back to life

 

[IamLEAM1983]

"The world has lost a valuable, irreplaceable piece of art", no it definitely has not. If your "art" is indistinguishable from trash, you are a failure. You are a drain on society and a waste of space. Go get a real job loser.

I'm terribly sorry, but artists use whatever medium they can and want to use. That includes refuse. Not to mention that the installation was probably clearly labeled on a nearby wall. If we go by your reasoning, does that mean Industrial Rock sucks because they use lots of sampled sounds from abandoned factories and power tools, instead of instruments? In that case, you've just shrugged off the likes of Front Line Assembly, Einsturzende Neubaten, Nine Inch Nails and Skinny Puppy. All influential music groups in their own right.

It's not so much a question of "getting a real job" as expanding the public's sometimes fairly lacking culture. I'd tell you to get an Art History class.

Do not mock the Kippenberger.
FEAR THE KIPPENBERGER!

But, hey, let's pass judgement about a destroyed piece of 'alleged' art without understanding the context in which it was made. Let's laugh at the materials and the price-tag, and call it pretentious, and confuse modern-art with pop-art, and put all the artists who aren't Rembrandt in the same category as the guy who canned shit. That's the way we prove we're good, decent, uninquisitive folk!

Amen to that. Amen.

 

[Wushu Panda]

"Modern Art" is bullshit. Im glad this thing was destroyed/cleaned up. Hopefully itll teach those pretentious art bastards a thing or two about collecting a jumble of crap together and passing it off as something meaningful.

 

[Cid Silverwing]

"Modern art" is not art. It's just throwing garbage into one place and calling it a day. Or if I have to phrase it in a more scholarly way, you can't make "organized disorganization".

It's bad enough I gotta put up with at least 3 "modern art" pieces scattered around my town here in Norway. And they're FUCK UGLY.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

Ah, sweet, sweet retribution. After I've been looking at modern 'art' for years and wondering what in the hell makes it art, it feels great that a cleaning lady saw a piece of 'modern art' and thought it was just something that needed cleaning.

Also, I Googled 'When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling.' The first two rows of images? Pictures of water damaged-ceilings. Then a picture of this work of 'art,' which was only featured because it was a part of an article on this very subject.

anyone else just think of the Mr Bean film?

OH GOD YES. I LOVED THAT SCENE.

My first thought was actually of that Spongebob episode when an art collector thinks Squidward's work "Bold and Brash" should be renamed "Belongs in the Trash," at which point a passing janitor apologizes for missing it and tosses it in the garbage.

 

[Char-Nobyl]

"Modern art" is not art. It's just throwing garbage into one place and calling it a day. Or if I have to phrase it in a more scholarly way, you can't make "organized disorganization".

It's bad enough I gotta put up with at least 3 "modern art" pieces scattered around my town here in Norway. And they're FUCK UGLY.

"Modern Art" is bullshit. Im glad this thing was destroyed/cleaned up. Hopefully itll teach those pretentious art bastards a thing or two about collecting a jumble of crap together and passing it off as something meaningful.

Weirdly enough, I've actually seen a piece of legitimately good modern art: it was an old detergent box, and a pretty big one, too. Probably economy sized or something. I thought it was just another pretentious piece of crap, but something about it was off. It seemed too...perfect. The corners were sharp, the edges straight, and generally looked unnatural somehow.

Then I got close enough to see: it was a wooden box that had been hand-painted to look exactly like what I had thought it was. It was the first and last time that modern art ever impressed me. And quite frankly, I'm not even sure if it was technically classified as modern art.

This enrages me somehow, so apperently I care about art ..odd

Nah. I'm guessing the rage comes from the fact that someone put a pile of kindling and a plastic trough under a water-damaged ceiling, called it art, and got it in a museum and insured for over a million dollars.

That is reason to be pissed, my friend. Embrace it.

 

[Sniperyeti]

It doesn't look very impressive, but still I have no idea how the cleaner mistook it for something to be cleaned up. I mean, you're in an ART GALLERY. That giant construction of planks wasn't just left lying there by mistake. Why are you scrubbing paint off of anything in a place used to showcase modern art?

 

[Thurston]

Beauty (and art) is in the eye of the beholder. I've got a picture folder, much of it from Deviantart, and there is some stuff in there that I think is wonderful. I totally understand that others may dismiss it completely. That's okay, it means something to me.

How valuable is it? It's value depends on what people are willing to pay for it. And not everyone values everything the same.

I certainly pay money for things that some people think are ridiculous, dangerous, or crazy, like video cards for gaming computers. But I can't, for the life of me, justify spending $5000 on a brand name purse, (or, buying a purse at all, for that matter).

I don't mind if some rich idiot forks over $1.1M for a piece of junk. However, when public money comes into it, that tends to grind my gears. Check up wikipedia for the Voice of Fire controversy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_Fire

$1.8M for a piece of work that can be replicated by a paint roller.

With tax money. Wonderful.

I worked in a paper mill for a while. The mill commissioned one of their workers to paint some murals. Landscapes, guys fishing, nothing too crazy. But, in the machine shop, he replicated Voice of Fire. Probably took him 5 minutes.

It strikes me that WHO does it seems to matter more than WHAT it is. If some goofball off the street glued some sticks together, and offered it for sale, nothing would happen. If an artist with a rep, who talks a good line, and convinces some other folks how cool it is, then he can make some money.

 

[ILikeEggs]

Just leaving these here.

From an article in The New York Times dated 1915 titled "Joseph Pennell Riddles the New Art Movement"

He has been told how a new artist was painting in the fields. A boy came up, looked at him, bothering him, stopping him. "Don't you wish you could paint like that?" said the new artist. "I can!" replied the boy. That is the new art.

And it is treason to call most of it art.

Scott Burdick's views are a little biased, but I have to agree with his stance on modern art to a good extent.
I do think abstract pieces can be decorative and "pretty" in some ways, but that does not qualify them as art in the same way that a toddler's finger-painting exploits can be qualified as art.
I also think that though beauty is an important subject in art, it is not the be-all and end-all of art. Humour, sorrow, social commentary and countless other things can find their place in art, but all this is besides the point.

As Hero in a half shell put it so well, true art immediately and viscerally impacts you. What causes this impact is implicit in the piece itself, and requires no contrived explanations, or interpretation to be appreciated at a purely visual level.

Also, I love all the pretentious people deriding everyone that knows modern art is a fraud and a sham. An idea completely arbitrarily attached to an unrelated visual does not make art, it makes a symbolic statement at most.

From a book on modern art, a topic detailing traditional realism

In the United States, a pragmatic preoccupation with material reality, with the "old" realism, so to speak, had been too deeply ingrained to die out, even as Abstract Expressionism and its Minimal aftermath made American painting and sculpture more rigorously abstract than anything ever seen in the history of art. Throughout this period, in fact, the most widely recognized of all living American painters was probably Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917), whose impeccably observed Christina's World (fig. 23.40) long remained, during an era dominated by abstraction, the most popular painting in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

What does the last sentence tell you? It tells you that the general public is not impressed by the fluff spouted by modern artists and their ilk, and the average person that does subscribe to modern art often does so out of fear for being ridiculed by the "cultured" elite, or because they've heard so much in the media about how modern art is the shit(See what I did there?).

 

[Quaxar]

In other news, somebody pissed in Duchamp's "Fountain" and drank Michael Craig-Martin's "Oak Tree".

 

[Double A]

Modern Art: indistinguishable from trash.

Oi! Don't make fun of my trash like that.

 

[8bitlove2a03]

In this thread: a large group of people who don't understand art. I am completely and totally shocked.

 

[SonicKoala]

And here we have a site of dedicated and passionate gamers, the overwhelming majority of which are steadfast in the defense of their beloved medium! So frequently under siege, it is, from the 'ignorant' and 'misguided' masses of society who would dare to bemoan their favourite pastime, accusing it of being nothing more than a childish form of escapism, a juvenile hobby so devoid of any intrinsic value or meaning. Oh, but how wrong they are! Video games are art! They are worthwhile! These people know nothing about video games - they've probably only seen brief clips or screen shots from one or two! How dare they condone an entire medium based on such limited knowledge.

And now gaze in utter amazement as these same people lambaste an entire genre of art, belittling it, accusing it of being nothing but 'trash' and a 'waste of space', devoid of any meaning or purpose and steeped in pretension. To anyone reading this thread, I'd advise you to step away from your screens before torrents of irony fly out of it, most likely knocking you unconscious (or, at the very least, leave you utterly perplexed at how amazing it is that a group of people who undoubtedly consider themselves rather open-minded would be so horrendously ignorant and judgmental about something they know little to nothing about).

This thread disgusts me.

 

[Bishop99999999]

Sadly, as a defender of games as art, I guess I have to defend this stuff too. Still, you think maybe artists could spend some time "in the trenches" so to speak, creating more traditional forms of art before they start going batshit loco and incorporate "fluids" and stuff into their work. I mean, if you're going to indulge your ego, try and make a name for yourself, first.

Or at least leave a post-it note that says "Art. Do not clean up."

Also, I like how the cleaning lady, when facing the probability of destroying a million dollar work of art, decided to act on the side of cleanliness rather than caution. That is exactly what I expect from a professional cleaning service.

 

[ILikeEggs]

This thread disgusts me.

Know what's funny? You people are so hell-bent on having games recognised as art, you're willing to call the blatant lie that is the modern art institution true and wholesome.

I can't call myself anything short of a gamer. I've got 2k+ hours in TF2, I've played a good amount of Quake Live, I loved System Shock, Starcraft, Doom, Quake, Half Life, Mega Man and a number of other games(just naming my favourite few). I've got a decent number of indie games associated with my Steam account. I still don't see most of those games as art.

Like other people have said, why is it so important for games to be recognised by people as art? Is your life not meaningful enough to you that you have to call a hobby "art" just because most people don't spend the time to understand that it can serve a purpose beyond mindless entertainment?
Where do we take this mindset next, logically? Do we start calling out for stamp-collecting to be recognized as an art form?

If anything, I see video games(or at least multiplayer games) as competitive sports.

To anyone reading this thread, I'd advise you to step away from your screens before torrents of irony fly out of it, most likely knocking you unconscious (or, at the very least, leave you utterly perplexed at how amazing it is that a group of people who undoubtedly consider themselves rather open-minded would be so horrendously ignorant and judgmental about something they know little to nothing about)

Ignorant? Hah. I know far more about modern art than I ever thought I'd care to know. In addition, I'm an illustrator(you know, those artists that create meaningless, commercialized art) and a digital sculptor.
Being open minded is no excuse to not call a spade a spade. Being open minded is no reason to blindly accept what a bunch of ponces tell you that whatever they call art is art because they thought it up first.

I'd like to be a realist art vigilante going around to modern art exhibits and replacing them with realist paintings and sculptures, a la Banksy. That'd show the buffoons.

 

[hazabaza1]

If I get to destroy modern 'art' for all eternity I'd gladly be a janitor.

 

[HDi]

Wow - so much raging.

This is a sculpture by Olafur Eliasson... and it's fucking amazing when you see it in person.

But sure... trash everything because you 'hate modern art'

Fuck the world would be boring if you guys were in charge.