It Finally Happened!

russ_watters

Well you can imagine me clothed, but that's a much more complex piece and will cost you $100.

Ryan_m_b

Clearly someone thought The Emperor's New Clothes was a business model.

Singham

This reminds me of the Laurel and Hardy episode Oliver The Eighth. LOL.

Disconnected

Okay, here's your 50 bucks.


Now give me 300 bucks or I sue your for damages (to my imaginary retinas).

Evo

How do they know it the art gets stolen?

zoobyshoe

Yeah. How do you insure it?

micromass

I have imagined that I found a truly marvelous proof of the Riemann hypothesis. So I'll be claiming my $1000000 prize soon!

Evo

Why is it that these imaginary artists don't accept imaginary money?

G01

Russ's statue sounds a lot like the pulsed IR laser we have in our lab: it's invisible and if you look directly at it you WILL go blind....

russ_watters

Thats irrelevant: 9/11 generated discussion too, but that doesn't make it art either.

Ryan_m_b

The fact that foolish things are complained about/ridiculed is not a testament to their value!

fuzzyfelt

I didn’t use the term “value”. I said “interest”, and complete disinterest wouldn’t result in the starting of a thread expressing aesthetic determinations, be they complaints/ridicule or not.

Should someone place value in challenging, or inciting discussion of, artistic perimeters, then wouldn't this be testament to some success?

Evo

I don't know that ridicule can be considered success, unless your goal was to be dismissed as utterly ludicrous.

Ryan_m_b

I'm not going to get bogged down in the meaning of art and if provoking conversation confirms the artyness of an act.

Whether generating discussion (ignoring the content of said discussion) is "success" depends on the metric by which success is measured. If we measure success as generating discussion then yes, MONA has generated discussion and so by that measure is a "success".

Taking it as a whole though attracting a great amount of ridicule, negative criticism and derision is not an indication of success, I'm going to have to disagree with P.T. Barnum's axiom that "all publicity is good publicity" and side with his far more sensible statement of "there's a sucker born every minute"

Ryan_m_b

And there's a precedence for art being crap and remaining crap. This is nothing good, nor particularly boundary pushing, this is just an example of anti-art (or considering the rise of anti-art to art status it's anti-anti-art).

An example of this would be exceedingly long films which show nothing happening or just somebody sleeping. It's different yes but we can all talk about it by setting a series of metrics by which to measure by and decide that as avant-garde as this is meant to be, it remains crap.

Evo

You guys can start another thread on this, russ's purpose was to show how stupid some things are, not to start a conversation on whether the nonsense means anything to anyone in anyway, so let's not derail the thread.

Ryan_m_b

Lol, defying art is infinitely recursive? Makes sense. By metrics I mean the measures by which we judge this act/concept to be good, off of the top of my head that could include but not be limited to;

How original is the idea?
What benefit does this idea have on the people who view it?
What does this art add to society?
Do I find this concept aesthetically pleasing?
How technical is the implementation of this concept?
What is the creators purpose (i.e to push boundaries or to make a buck)?
Is this art satirical or taking the piss?

EDIT Sorry Evo I was writing as you posted!