From "390kg of peanut butter cover rotterdam gallery floor, celebrating humor and absurdity" (designboom).
Here's the Wikipedia page for Wim T. Schippers, who died last month at the age of 83. Excerpt: " During the 1960s, he worked mostly as a visual artist, associated with the international Fluxus-movement. As a television writer, director, and actor he was responsible for some of the most notable and controversial shows on Dutch televisions from the 1960s to the 1990s, creating a number of lasting characters and creating terms and expressions which entered wide usage. In addition, he voiced the characters of Ernie and Kermit the Frog on Sesamstraat, the Dutch version of Sesame Street."
And: "Schippers' art work is praised for its sense of humor; when a dozen journalists stood pensively around the peanut butter platform, Schippers cried out, 'Isn't this fantastic! We're all watching peanut butter!'"
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Imagine if you added up all hours you spent promoting these nonsensense pieces by half wits in the dying MSM how much mind space you would have to consider issues important to America instead of running from them...
Silly goose with a high school educated hillbilly she took in... that's all there is to life now, annie?
This type of insensitive art gets off on mocking people with a peanut butter addiction. Thanks to Jesus they didn't use Teddy's peanut butter. That would have been devastating.
This is something, but it is not art.
There is a great scene in the series "Billions" where a woman comes up to an avant garde artist at an exhibition and says, "I love this piece!". The artist says, "tell me what you like about it". The woman stares at him blankly and walks away"
Did they have to prevent folks with peanut allergies from entering the museum? Also, does a rather mundane and brief set of instructions for someone else to create the actual work really make him the artist?
Schippers got at least one thing right — smooth peanut butter is the only acceptable kind
Do you want ants? This is how you get ants!
Walter DeMaria’s NY Earth Room has been on display in a SoHo gallery continuously since the 1970s. It’s a room filled with about two feet of dirt across the entire floor. You view it from the doorway where a plexiglass barrier keeps the dirt from spilling out. If that’s your thing, the gallery is at 141 Wooster St., maintained by the Dia Art Foundation and open free of charge.
The interest in conceptual art like this has long since faded. There’s a strong once-and-done vibe to viewing a room full of dirt or P,B and J or whatever. But that period was also a time when people bought pet rocks. Yes, indeed, the world is full of absurdity and has also never lacked for fools either.
Absurdism has got to be the most worthless of trends in art. Sure, be a nihilist, nobody showed you how and nobody needs you to show them how. It needs an art form like a colony of chipmunks needs a mayor.
Ants, cockroaches, mice, and rats. Plus any lucky labrador clever enough to elude security. "Art" should not include extra work for the cleaners, nor is wasting food a message anyone should endorse. But there is no reasoning with wealthy fools.
“ 'Isn't this fantastic! We're all watching peanut butter!'"
“Heheheh…He said “butt”…heheheheh….”
As usual, Beavis and Butt-Head provide the most insightful commentary on contemporary art.
He neutered any message from the peanut butter floor by forbidding people to walk on it. That means it's no longer a floor; it's just another canvas. If he was truly committed to the bit, he'd use crunchy PB and insist that patrons walk across it barefoot.
"’Art’ should not include extra work for the cleaners.”
100% this.
What a horrible job cleaning all this. Do these idiot artists ever think of anybody but themselves?
It's not art until the artist is nude.
Well-to-do art dilettantes with external sources of income...find each other to provide funds and be funded. First-world humor. Also, don't forget the Hunter Biden model of politics-driven payments hidden as art. And grants. MacArthur "Genius" grants.
Insert a list of 100 sarcastic simulations of fine art that fooled experts here: ____________________________
“If he was truly committed to the bit, he'd use crunchy PB and insist that patrons walk across it barefoot.”
@Tom T, and he’d stick Legos in it.
I guess that the plasterers get a pass since they're just makin' a buck at their job. Everyone else remotely involved with this farce - museum officials, spectators, admiring reviewers, etc - should be utterly embarrassed for themselves.
This is from Althouse’s link: “
First introduced in 1962, the Peanut Butter Floor (Pindakaasvloer) is a conceptual artwork covered with a thick layer of peanut butter. The humorous, absurd nature of the work raises questions like ‘is this art?’ and ‘am I allowed to find this beautiful?’, reflecting Schippers’ belief that art does not necessarily have to be logical or useful, it may as well ‘be absurd – just like life itself – and that is precisely what makes it worthwhile.”
I get what’s being said, but this type of art is just not my thing, at all, so I guess I don’t get IT.
Regards,
Lori (reader_iam)
"I get what’s being said, but this type of art is just not my thing, at all, so I guess I don’t get IT."
A reasonable response, because it's not art. It wasn't art then, it isn't now.
Dutch farmers have to kill off most of the country's cows, so that artist can waste the energy emissions required to produce bushels of peanuts on art. This is referred to as "worthwhile".
Was that a political statement? Europeans associate peanut butter with Americans.
We don't have a word for what conceptual art is, so we call it art. If we had such a word, arguments about whether it is really "art" would be rarer.
This is a type of art. It is referred to as " A Joke".
"Walter DeMaria’s NY Earth Room has been on display in a SoHo gallery continuously since the 1970s. It’s a room filled with about two feet of dirt across the entire floor. You view it from the doorway where a plexiglass barrier keeps the dirt from spilling out..."
That's great (and I've blogged about it), but it's from 1977. This peanut butter floor is from 1962, 15 years earlier.
Schippers just died, so you might want to celebrate him. He thought the artwork was funny and he also did other things, including being the voice of Kermit and Ernie on the Dutch
"Sesame Street." Why be a sourpuss about it? Everyone loves peanut butter.
I would have made it smaller - the size of slice of wonder bread.
Scale changes everything about this.
“ Why be a sourpuss about it? Everyone loves peanut butter.”
Maybe we don’t like to see it wasted on stupid “art”. Maybe this was funny (to some people) in 1962, but surely the joke’s gone stale even for them after 60 years.
"Everyone loves peanut butter" except those with allergies and or lectin sensitivities wereby it causes heartburn and raw open sores in the digestive tract. Not so rare.
Well-to-do art dilettantes with external sources of income...
Lazy alcoholic mountebanks with minimal talent go to parties with insecure nouveau-riche Beverly Hills housewives, and this is the result.
ART IS SHIT.
Artists are parasites and grifters.
Only in a world of capitalist plenty and luxury could this kind of useless horse shit find funding.
In the 1970s, Tom Wolfe suggested that Conceptual Art was the logical terminus of Modern Art, the point where visual interest in the work was replaced by the beauties of Art Theory as the driver of the aesthetic experience. His book, The Painted Word (1975), argued that the critics not the artists were now the key players, with the pleasures of reading and writing about this stuff being the object of the exercise. The three ‘Bergs (Harold, Clement, Robert) were the high priests of the Art World’s inner sanctum, the gnostic guides into the hidden truths of Art (with a capital A). That book like Wolfe’s other send-ups of the period, was a laugh-out-loud hoot, and caused a nervous breakdown in the NY art scene. As a newly arrived resident of NYC at the time living in SoHo, it was all a great introduction to absurdities far more entertaining than a PB floor mat or a room filled with dirt.
YouTube creators by the thousands do stuff like this every day. Most are much more compelling, funny, or challenging. When it comes to minimal effort entertainment, we are spoiled rotten.
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