"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 [the late Dutch artist and comedian Wim T.] 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.' Rather than exhibiting the preserved floor from 1962, the installation is recreated each time according to the artist’s precise instructions.... 'it requires 15.6 kilos of smooth peanut butter (not chunky) per square meter, no one should stand or lie on the peanut butter floor, the peanut butter should be applied as smoothly and monotonously as possible, and the work should not be approached with any educational purpose.'..."

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!'"

"For four months... the Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins woke up every day before dawn, brewed coffee and sat down at her dining table to copy out Herman Melville’s 'Moby-Dick' (1851) with a nib pen."

"Writing in midnight blue acidic ink on onionskin paper, she made her way through the book’s 900-plus pages 10 at a time. The resulting work, 'Or, the Whale, Vol. I-III,' is housed in three black clothbound binders. 'It felt ritualistic,' says Collins, 41, of the project, 'like meditation.'"

From "Why One Artist Transcribed All 900-Plus Pages of ‘Moby-Dick’ by Hand/For Bethany Collins, Herman Melville’s novel is rife with centuries-old political anxieties that still resonate today" (NYT).

If you were to do a similar art project, based on someone else's writing, what book would you choose?

This sort of thing has been done before. In 1974 the conceptual artist Allen Ruppersberg copied "The Picture of Dorian Gray" by hand. Collins acknowledges this inspiration.

We've also heard that Hunter S. Thompson typed out "The Great Gatsby" and "A Farewell to Arms." I don't think he presented that as conceptual art.

"'Looking at a girl totally naked is not exciting,' said Éric Stefanut, the communications director for the French Naturist Federation."

"Naturists, he explained, see new people naked all the time. 'So,' he added, 'it’s boring.'... When everyone in a room is naked, no one person stands out — although there were many body types among the visitors on Friday. There were tattoos and pierced nipples, ribs and fleshy tummies, bald spots and wispy beards. Scrotums and breasts swung wide. Some had cesarean scars.... Lucca Linke, 31, said she had thought about trimming her body hair. But why bother? Her friend, Kaja Baumgart, 22, agreed. She had worried that other guests would notice her tampon string. But soon, she said, she relaxed. 'Everybody is acting like normal,' she said. 'I can also be acting like normal.'"

From "At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door/A museum in Marseille, France, has a show dedicated to the history of social nudity. On a few special nights, visitors strolled around naked, too" (NYT).

It's art — purportedly — to take what is very interesting and endeavor to make it boring.

"Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system..."

"... that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions. Even the missing money in the work has a monetary value when it is called art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity. Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions."

Said the Kunsten Museum's exhibition guide, about the 2 completely blank canvases it chose to display, quoted in "A Danish artist has been ordered to repay a museum after delivering blank canvases" (NPR).

The museum had advanced Jens Haaning over $75,000 so that he could recreate an earlier work of his in which he attached actual cash to the canvas. In that earlier work, the money was supposed to represent the wage gap between Danish workers and Austrian workers. Haaning is considered a "conceptual artist," and the new work expresses a concept that the museum made a show of understanding (or pretending to understand).

"The mainstream media... was reporting on it like it was all beautiful... But then when it came out, a little boy pointed out — 'That’s a penis!' and everyone was like, 'Yo, that’s a big old dong, man.'"

Said Seneca Scott, the 43-year-old cousin of Coretta Scott King, quoted in "'Woke' $10M MLK 'penis' statue insults black community: Coretta Scott King kin" (NY Post).

ADDED: I wonder if the sculptor thoroughly knew it looked like "a big old dong" but believed people would be so conned to believe that it's supposed to be beautiful art that it would take months or years before his true vision dawned on them.

The sculptor — Hank Willis Thomas — is referred to as a "conceptual" artist. What is conceptual about the reproduction of a photograph of MLK hugging his wife? Cutting the image down to just the arms and hands? Or designing it to look plainly — once the scales fall from your eyes — like a big old dong?

OR: Perhaps the concept is an attempted sophisticated joke on white people: They’ll see the penis, but they won’t say it out loud because they are terrified at the idea that they will be called racist.

"He became famous in the 1970s for what he called his 'dé-finition/méthode' paintings, which were in fact sets of instructions for making a painting."

"One of his signature 'protocols,' as they were also called, was to paint a canvas the same color as the wall on which it would hang. He did not do this himself; rather, he enlisted a 'charge-taker' — an art collector, museum representative or independent curator — to make the work according to his specifications.... Mr. Rutault’s wryly iconoclastic process represented a break from the past, subverting the basic notion that painters are people who paint. Instead of making paintings, he wrote texts; yet his work was both collaborative and potentially open-ended. His 'protocol' could be painted and repainted, as the charge-taker saw fit. As a result, he said, 'The painting is never finished.'... 'He’s one of the only artists who won’t see what his work looks like in the future, and it will still be his work.'... 'Claude called himself a painter.... Everyone else called him a conceptual artist. It’s true that he did not touch paint or canvasses, but instead he wrote paintings.'"

From "Claude Rutault, Master of the Painted Word, Is Dead at 80/His paintings were actually instructions for making paintings. One of his signature 'protocols' was to paint a canvas the same color as the wall on which it would hang" (NYT).

"In the fall of 1961, [Yoko] Ono gave a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall.... Onstage, twenty artists and musicians performed different acts—eating, breaking dishes, throwing bits of newspaper."

"At designated intervals, a toilet was flushed offstage. A man was positioned at the back of the hall to give the audience a sense of foreboding. A huddle of men with tin cans tied to their legs attempted to cross the stage without making noise. The dancers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown sat down and stood up repeatedly. According to the Village Voice, the performance finished with Ono’s amplified 'sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.'... When conceptual artists hit the big time, at the end of the nineteen-sixties, her name was virtually never mentioned.... When Ono and Lennon married, she was a coterie artist and he was a popular entertainer.... She decided that condescension to popular entertainment is a highbrow prejudice. As she put it, 'I came to believe that avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.' So she became a pop star.... When 'Imagine' was released, one of Ono’s instruction pieces from 'Grapefruit' was printed on the back cover: 'Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.'"

Writes Louis Menand in "Yoko Ono’s Art of Defiance Before she met John Lennon, she was a significant figure in avant-garde circles and had created a masterpiece of conceptual art. Did celebrity deprive her of her due as an artist?" (The New Yorker).

"We were like, 'what if he bought it and ate it?'"

Said Kane Powell, author of the petition described in "Why Do People Want Jeff Bezos to Buy and Eat the Mona Lisa?/An online petition that started as a joke has gone viral, becoming a kind of digital performance art piece all of its own" (NYT). 

This article is illustrated with a photo of Jeff Bezos standing next to a portrait of Jeff Bezos. I would rather see closeups of Jeff Bezos and the Mona Lisa side by side, with Bezos looking as much like Lisa as possible. My slapdash effort:

 

Must I go back to the article? Powell's joke is explained pedantically. He's calling attention to "the absurdity of massive amounts of accumulated wealth." Oh, really? We're told the Mona Lisa isn't even up for sale, but if it were, what would it cost, and what would stop the buyer from destroying it? And what is it even made of? Tuna fish?

I swear I wrote that last question — a joke, based on the previous post — before I read this paragraph in the Mona Bezos article:

More recently, in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach, the New York artist David Datuna ate the banana in Maurizio Cattelan’s buzzy and high-priced “Comedian.” (He said that “it tasted like $120,000.”) Mr. Datuna also claimed that it wasn’t an act of vandalism, but a performance. “This is the first time where an artist eats the concept of another artist,” he said.

The tuna! 

"'It will one day be worth $1 billion'... Many people really, really wanted the Beeple sale to succeed. In fact, the high price [$69.3 million] smacked of market manipulation."

"NFTs rely on blockchain, a database technology based on decentralized, collective control of blocks of data that have been chained together in a way that makes the data immutable. Metapurse — the company founded and financed by Metakovan, the buyer of 'Everydays' — says it 'identifies early-stage projects across blockchain infrastructure, finance, art, unique collectibles, and virtual estate.' According to the Art Newspaper, Metapurse 'is also a production studio for NFTs and a major funder of the digital art form, reportedly owning the largest known collection of NFTs in the world.'... Making the whole spectacle look even more egregiously engineered, the underbidder was Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, another blockchain company.... The irony is that the driving force behind conceptual art... was a desire to resist commodification.... Conceptualists... thought that if you dematerialized art — if you took away the object and our urge to fetishize it — it would be an act of resistance against the art market and the whole capitalist system. How naive that turned out to be. Of course you can commodify artworks that exist only as ideas! It’s really easy.... You need only relationships, differentials, future projections and other ideas, all of which can be bought and sold.... As for the actual work that was purchased? Yawn. Beeple’s technique — collaging lots of colorful images in grid format — is a soporific cliche. Images like this, sometimes coalescing into other images, are ubiquitous. Metakovan’s claim — that 'it represents 13 years of everyday work' — is weak tea.... [But] I like it when the connection between functionality (or even aesthetic merit) and monetary worth is stretched. It can make us question conventional ideas of what has value and what doesn’t. That can be salutary...."

Writes Sebastian Smee in "Beeple’s digital ‘artwork’ sold for more than any painting by Titian or Raphael. But as art, it’s a great big zero" (WaPo).

This blog represents 17 years of everyday work. Where's my $90.6 million? 

Anyway... what do I care if rich people shift their money around according to the rules of some wacky game and get nothing tangible? It's the same thing that occurs in gambling. Is anyone defrauded at any point? Are they paying their sales taxes and income tax properly? Other than that, how can it matter? Is there a philosophical question to contemplate? 

I forget whether Metakovan is a person or a company. Let's see: "the buyer, the Singapore-based founder and financer of the cryptofund Metapurse who goes by the name Metakovan." 

So it's a person, some cryptic figure in Singapore. The prefix "meta-" denotes "change, transformation, permutation, or substitution" (OED). So "Metapurse," I get. But what is Metakovan? Kovan is a geographical location in Singapore. Is there really a person here?

Considering the complexity of the concepts, I wonder: Is the real artist Metakovan or Beeple? Or is there really anything at all — other than the market, a concept to be admired and cavorted in or scorned by each of us, as we see fit. 

And, again: Where's my $90.6 million?

"Lena Stringari, the Guggenheim’s chief conservator, said the instructions will be quite easy to follow and are quite complete in addressing questions like how often to change bananas..."

"... (7 to 10 days) and where to affix them ('175 cm above ground'). 'Of all the works I have to confront, this is probably one of the simplest,' Ms. Stringari said. 'It’s duct tape and a banana,' she added. The conservation of conceptual art is not always so straightforward for museums increasingly asked to preserve works made from of all kinds of ephemeral substances, like food. How does one care for a scale model of an Algerian city made out of couscous? A sculpture made of interlocking tortillas? Fruit stuck on a coatrack? (All works the Guggenheim has shown.)... 'Once you think art is an idea and the material is secondary then it does not matter if that material lasts for a long time,”' said Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian in Washington. The Hirshhorn has its own conservation specialists who tend to art created from 'time-based' materials that degrade. 'A lot of them are really challenging. The museum’s role in a way is to preserve the work forever.'"

From "It’s a Banana. It’s Art. And Now It’s the Guggenheim’s Problem/Ephemeral works of art, like Maurizio Cattelan’s creation out of fruit, can often pose conservation challenges for the museums that have them" (NYT).

Highly rated comment: "This type of work is infuriating. It puts the rest of us creative types in the awkward position of defending support for the arts when this is what that support is being used for. Sure, in better times, the conversation sparked by the 'work' has value, but the tone deaf absurdity of the thing itself plus its maintenance in this time of national trauma is a bit grotesque."

Maybe work that causes you to think deeply about time and decay is especially valuable during a national trauma.

A Belgian conceptual artist is working with Ethiopian to create the perfect chicken.

"Incubated Worlds, a research and breeding center in the capital Addis Ababa, will also house a permanent art installation showcasing the work of Koen Vanmechelen, including photographs, videos, and books of chickens' genetic codes. 'It's the most sexy chicken coop in the world,' said Mr. Vanmechelen, whose Cosmopolitan Chicken Project set out to create a chicken carrying the genes of all the planet's breeds. The artist told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that each successive generation of Cosmopolitan Chickens is more resilient, lives longer, and is less susceptible to diseases, proving the importance of genetic diversity.... Olivier Hanotte, a scientist with ILRI in Addis Ababa...  praised Vanmechelen for doing what scientists could not – creating a unique population of chickens that gives a snapshot of the genetic diversity of birds outside Ethiopia... 'That is a fantastic resource for us... There's no way that as a scientist I would have gotten a grant for 20 years to do this sort of experiment."

Reports the Christian Science Monitor.

"[T]wo students jokingly placed a store-bought pineapple on an empty table at an art exhibition this month at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen..."

"When they returned a few days later to the exhibition... they were shocked to discover their pineapple protected by a glass display case, instantly and mysteriously transformed into a work of art."

After one of the students, Lloyd Jack, 22, who studies business, put a photograph of the pineapple on Twitter, along with the words, “I made art,” the image was shared widely on social media, turning the fruit, fairly or not, into a cultural sensation....

Before long, the work, which the two students titled “Pineapple,” had been deconstructed on art blogs and social media worldwide; parsed in Paris, Texas and Tokyo; and even featured on Canadian television. Some on Twitter lauded its “genius,” while others ridiculed it as the latest example of conceptual art’s plodding banality....

There are so many stories like this. I feel as though I've read a hundred of them over the years, 200 if you include the cases of actual art that was regarded as not art and thrown away. Well, maybe that's how the glass case got there. Somebody thought it was part of the artwork and feared that some custodian would throw it out. The case is like a sign saying: "This is art."*

I'm not convinced the whole thing was not a PR stunt. I just need to say that so I'm not roped into being part of someone else's artwork. 
________________________

* Like Duchamp signing the urinal. 

The "conceptual art" idea of having a celebrity arrive as an ordinary model for a routine life drawing class.

The traditional art-school drawing from the model — and I've been there, done that a thousand times — becomes a different kind of event — supposedly! — when somebody famous strips down and sits/lies/stands there for the students — who are surprised to find themselves scrutinizing and delineating... Iggy Pop.

You can see the drawings at the Brooklyn Museum... even though the drawings are merely conventional life-class drawings. It's hard to see why they deserve a museum show. The "conceptual art" — such as it was — is lost in the past, the performance of Iggy in the room, surprising people by behaving like an ordinary life-class model, transforming the experience in whatever way it was transformed. You can't see that at the Museum.

The Museum is trying to make up for the shortcoming with additional artwork — "works depicting male bodies from the Museum’s collections... from ancient Egypt, Africa, India, Japan, and Mexico, as well as prints and drawings by Egon Schiele and Max Beckmann, and photographs by Eadweard Muybridge and Robert Mapplethorpe." This way the show will, we are told, "examin[e]the representation of masculinity across a larger international  and historical spectrum."

The museum also portrays the exhibit as part of its "Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum." How does the depiction of the male body fit into reimagining feminism? Well, that's the point, isn't it?, you're supposed to reimagine. But wait, I will help: The male body is designed to fit into the female. The female naturally encompasses the male, both in heterosexual intercourse and in pre-birth existence.

"Two years ago, the Smithsonian Institution acquired a conceptual work by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar that reflects on the funeral of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr."

"The piece — titled 'Life Magazine, April 19, 1968' — is one of Jaar’s lesser-known works, produced when he was culling through the archives of the iconic magazine."

Alongside a reproduction of a photo of King’s funeral that ran in “Life,” Jaar graphically lays bare the nation’s racial divisions at the time of the civil rights leader’s death. In one frame, Jaar represents all of the African Americans at the funeral march with black dots. In a second frame, he shows the white people present as red dots. There are thousands of black dots and only a few dozen red ones....

How could Americans of all racial backgrounds not have mourned the death of the great civil rights leader?...

When King died, he was advocating for “radical economic change” and had taken a stance against the Vietnam War, [the civil rights historian David Garrow said]. Both of those issues alienated him from some former supporters. “People in the Democratic Party thought King had self-marginalized. His murder alters his historical status hugely. What people now remember is his post-assassination enshrinement.”

"NICK BEEF."

"Yes, he admits again, he has a penchant for the morbid. But this does not mean that he bought the plot next to Oswald’s as a joke, or a piece of installation art, or anything of the kind. It’s personal. It’s about change. The fragility of life. Something."

George Brecht composed "Drip Music": "a source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel."

He'd write an "event score" -- "printed on a small white card that he would mail to friends.... Mr. Brecht said that he did not care if any of his event scores were realized and that he did not think that there was a correct way to perform one."



Back in the 1950s, when Jackson Pollock was painting (doing things with paint), you had to ask yourself: What is the next step? First, Brecht tried painting "using chance operations and materials like bed sheets, ink and marbles." But it's better -- is it not? -- to rid yourself of the paint altogether, and then rid yourself of the work itself: Just write a brief description on a card.

In those days, there were no blogs. But it was like blogging, no? A few words on a blank white rectangle are enough.

And yet, there are all those serious people in that video clip with their microphones and watering cans. Are they any less annoying than mimes? And if you're going to perform this minimal, quiet music, you've got to find a space that isn't horrifically overwhelmed with the mechanical noise of a forced air system that drowns out the dripping.

But the dripping goes on whether you hear it or not, and now the last drop has dribbled out for George Brecht, the Fluxus artist.

Dead at age 82.

The iPhone app that costs $999 and gives you a tiny gemstone icon that opens to a larger glowing image.

I Am Rich.

Apple removed it. But why? Is it a fraud?



It is what it is.

Created by iPhone developer Armin Heinrich, the original blurb for the... download read: "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this… It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all."

It's perfect conceptual art, now, isn't it?

ADDED: I paid 99¢ for the very charming Koi app.

Yes, it was a tad ridiculous to pay $8 million for it...

... but now it isn't even it anymore. You've just constructed a replica of it... and therefore: a monument to your folly.

It was a delicate undertaking, one that required rubberized protective jumpsuits, long tables of medical equipment and more than 224 gallons of formaldehyde. The goal: to replace the decaying tiger shark that floats in one of Mr. Hirst’s best-known works of Conceptual art, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”...

[A]s a result of inadequate preservation efforts, time was not kind to the original, which slowly decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled, and the solution in the tank turned murky....

Mr. Hirst acknowledges that once the shark is replaced, art historians will argue that the piece cannot be considered the same artwork.

Yes, exactly.

“It’s a big dilemma,’’ he said. “Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a Conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.’’

People have often asked me how I could go from art school to law school, art being so far removed from law, so very unlike it. But, no, it's not, is it? Original intention. What a wonderful phrase for finessing your interpretation! And may I suggest to Mr. Hirst the notion of a living artwork? Now, that could get you everything you ever want.

What did He do? (Not miscapitalized!)

Conceptual art marches on:

An artist that came to Buffalo to perform in an exhibition tracing the development of Chinese conceptual art is now in trouble with the law after trying to perform another stunt.

He Yun Chang, 38, of Beijing sat in a plexiglas box filled with concrete up to his waist on Friday in front of the Albright Knox Gallery totally naked.

Wait! Wasn't he kind of wearing concrete pants? Boxy, concrete pants...

Saturday afternoon, Chang decided to perform another stunt.

State Parks Police say Chang stripped off all his clothing, tied a rope around his waist to some sort of an anchor and walked out about 40 to 50 feet towards the brink of the falls.

Police believe that his plan was to stand out in the water totally naked for 24-hours.

Chang even had a staff member from UB and several people filming the stunt until something went wrong. The rope that was holding him from slipping into the rapids came untied and he had to wade back towards shore.

That's when a tourist spotted the naked man in the water and called police thinking that he may be suicidal.

Tourists! Such philistines!

I can't believe this artist.

BBC reports:

An art work purportedly made from excess fat from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sold for $18,000 (£9,862).

Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti claims to have bought the fat from a clinic where the leader had a liposuction operation performed....

"I came up with the idea of because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi," Motti told Welwoche magazine.

We're asked to think the artist thought this up entirely independently of the widely known film/book "Fight Club." What do you think that bar of soap in Brad's hand is?

Whoever bought the thing is a fool for buying conceptual art where the concept is already extremely well known from a previously existing art work.