Saturday, November 05, 2011

Cleaning Up a Mistake

So a cleaner made a "million dollar mistake" in a German museum? How horrible, I thought. Until I read the article:

A cleaner with the best intentions accidentally destroyed a piece of art worth more than $1 million when she removed what she thought was a "stain" from the installation. Spoiler alert: It wasn't really a stain.

The piece of art, titled "When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings," features a series of wooden planks and a (formerly) discolored plastic bowl. The artist, the late Martin Kippenberger, intended for viewers to understand that the bowl had been discolored by water running over the pieces of wood.

Thank you, cleaner. Sometimes people are stupid. If your "art" is indistinguishable from a dirty bowl, you don't have art. You have a dirty bowl.

Now we at least have a clean bowl. Which is worth far more than what that artistic hack did to it. I swear to God, stuff like this just pisses me off. The "artist" slaps together some stuff he "wants us to understand" and calls it a day--and apparently a million dollar check.

The only million dollar mistake was valuing that discolored bowl and wooden scaffolding set at a million bucks.

Photo from the article.

Hey, maybe if the man in the picture dances around a bit and sheds a sad little tear over the artistic loss, it will become "performance art." And voila! $1.2 million art! A tidy profit, what?

What I want you to understand is that modern art is just an exercise by a narrow elite to have an excuse to look down their noses at the unwashed masses who can't appreciate what the elites claim to appreciate.