Althouse: Paint me skeptical.

October 29, 2015

Paint me skeptical.

"An art exhibit in Italy has been restored after it was mistakenly binned by a cleaner. The artwork, named 'Where shall we go dancing tonight?'... consisted of cigarette butts, empty champagne bottles and confetti. The museum has now re-installed the artwork after getting the artists' approval. The installation at the Museion Bozen-Bolzano was created by two artists from Milan to represent the hedonism and political corruption of the 1980s...."

That's from the BBC.

Sorry, I just don't believe this was an accident. This kind of thing has happened before, the cleanup is way too performance-y — photo caption: "The cleaner separated the glass, plastic and paper into individual bags" — and it works as it has before as a big publicity generator. I don't really like giving it publicity myself, but the BBC bought it, so who am I? I'm blogging to say I'm skeptical. Hedonism and political corruption of the 1980s, indeed.

14 comments:

Wince said...: Is "ASSOL" Italian for asshole?

Kind of like CNBC in the US.; 10/29/15, 9:56 AM
Scott said...: Many years ago, at an art museum in St Paul Minnesota, on a wooden plinth, sat a used Sunbeam electric hand mixer with the cord cut off. According to a placard, the title of the work was "Owl" and there was an artist's name there (not Mr. Sunbeam but someone else.) The bottom of the mixer did sort of look like the face of an owl.

I wonder who paid for that work to be displayed there?

"Art is anything you can get away with."
--Andy Warhol; 10/29/15, 10:10 AM
BIll Sommerfeld said...: Several prior instances are discussed here: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/282258/wisdom-janitors-mark-krikorian

NO KNIFE

A STUDY IN MIXED MEDIA IN EARTH TONES, NUMBER THREE.

Realized by James Tetazoo, December 1984

The artist’s mode d’emploi relies upon minimalist kinematic methods; space and time are frozen in a staid reality of restrained sexuality. Temporary occasionalism, soon overcome throughout by symbolic nihility, pervades our earliest perception of the work. An overturned throwaway obelisk functions as symbolic pedestal; the work rests upon a manifestation of grey toned absence. Epicurean imagery is employed most effectively by Tetazoo; the glass, the porcelain, the plastic move in conflicting directions and yet are joined in a mood of stark pacifism. The sterile lateralism of the grouped utensils (sans knife), conveys a sense of eternal ennui, framed within the subtle ambience of discrete putrefaction. The casual formalism of the place setting draws upon our common internal instinct of existential persistence to unify us with the greater consciousness of human bondage.; 10/29/15, 11:00 AM
tim maguire said...: I'm not sure "restored" is the right word either. The trash bins were dumped out on the ground.; 10/29/15, 11:17 AM
mikee said...: In the 1980s, once a year an art prof at my enormous state university was granted space in the student center to install thousands of Kewpie dolls, Colorful plastic blocks and industrial widgets (fasteners, hinges, oddly shaped parts) into about a thousand square feet of organized chaos, rank upon rank, with the ability to walk around the display or gaze down at if from a balcony. It was very popular.

It was also crap, and the art prof proclaimed it as such, stating something along the lines of, "The human eye sees patterns in repetition and the human mind connects things that are totally different from each other, in wondrous ways."

I believe he even got paid for doing this, which is great gig, if you can get it.

Then again, the university also hosted a huge exhibit of Chinese dissident art in the late 1980s, full of walls with cracks and birds flying towards the horizon, so it had some sensibile souls among the administration back then.; 10/29/15, 11:41 AM
Wilbur said...: If anybody wants to think of this and exhibit it as art, more power to you.

If you ask me to pay for it with my taxes, you're walking on my fighting side.; 10/29/15, 12:17 PM
mtrobertslaw said...: Maybe the janitor was creating performance art.; 10/29/15, 12:24 PM
Unknown said...: Phony art, or phart, depends for its value on what people can be provoked to say about it. I suspect the same as AA - that the news item is as much an artifact as the piece and is integral with it.; 10/29/15, 12:44 PM
Chris said...: This story pops up every few years. I assume it's just marketing or something.

http://gawker.com/cleaning-lady-throws-away-expensive-modern-art-she-mist-1527595660

http://gizmodo.com/5856515/a-janitor-accidentally-scrubbed-away-a-million-dollar-art-piece

http://www.wnd.com/2001/11/11553/

Some contemporary exhibits were damaged as a result of diligence of museum staff who tried to clean up the museum area of what they perceived as a foreign or unclean object:

In 1980s, a work by Joseph Beuys was altered when a janitor neatly cleaned up what he saw as a dirty bathtub in a German art gallery.
In 2001, staff of the London's Eyestorm Gallery trashed an exhibit by Damien Hirst which appeared as a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups.
In 2004, an employee of Tate Britain disposed of what appeared as a plastic bag of trash sitting next to an artwork; the bag was part of an exhibition "Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art" by Gustav Metzger.[17]
In 2012, an employee of Glenn Beck scrubbed clean a fish bowl that had been painted and signed by Orson Welles in 1940. The bowl had arrived from an auction that day and was left on Beck's desk in his locked office.[18]
In 2014, a cleaning lady of Italian city of Bari threw away several artworks displayed in the context of an art show curated by Flip Project space, hosted in Sala Murat.[19]; 10/29/15, 12:44 PM
RonF said...: "An art exhibit in Italy has been restored after it was mistakenly binned by a cleaner. The artwork, named 'Where shall we go dancing tonight?'... consisted of cigarette butts, empty champagne bottles and confetti."

Based on the description of the "art"work, I'd say that there was no mistake at all.; 10/29/15, 1:14 PM
Fred Drinkwater said...: Last summer I visited some exhibits at the Biennale in Venice. One piece was a wall of shelves with about 200 alarm clocks of various sorts, all manual wind-up I believe. There was an attendant from the museum winding up clocks. I almost asked her if she was an actual component of the piece, but decided not to.
This was not an interesting piece, but overall I'd say that about 1/3 of the pieces I saw in the city were worth some attention, with some few very interesting. A better percentage than I expected. Considering essentially all the exhibits were free, quite a deal.
There were only one or two which might have been mistaken for debris. There were, however, many piles of actual construction debris in the various buildings, some full of fascinating bits of antique construction - sadly I did not think to label any of them as official Biennale artworks.; 10/29/15, 2:22 PM
JackOfClubs said...: I still say the janitor was the true artist and his (her?) work has now been desecrated.; 10/29/15, 2:32 PM
jr565 said...: Was it in fact reinstated? Or did they just take some garbage and cigarette butts and put them on the display, and no one recognized the difference?; 10/29/15, 7:44 PM
robother said...: Moore's Law + Warhol's Fifteen Minutes of Fame= In the future, everyone will become a Troll, every expression of opinion or work of art will be deformed by the need to draw clicks.; 10/29/15, 9:29 PM