he found it

shitty old chair, nothing moreThat's art -- sorry, Art -- you're looking at there. Dave Barry came across it at a Miami Beach art show, and he couldn't make any more sense of it than I can:

...a ratty old collapsed armchair - worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled "Chair." I asked her what role the artist had played in creating "Chair." She said: "He found it."    [pic]
Dave further notes that "Chair" (actually "chair", otherwise known as "Untitled (ellipses) II"), by brilliant scam artist Rodney McMillian, is for sale: a mere $2800. I wouldn't touch the feculent thing for twice that, but here is one James Scarborough blurbing in artcritical.com:
Rodney McMillian's work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn't deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition which posits that what's not seen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps moreso, as that which is. [...] The subject... is not our reaction to a void but our innate tendency to venerate the void itself as something sacred and iconic. [...] As a repository and sum of former posteriors that have dented its cushions, of previous elbows that have grazed the armrests, the chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.
Uh, what? I'd get those innate tendencies looked at, mate. The comedy just writes itself here, and I don't care if I am shooting fish in a barrel: these idiots are funny. My hat's off to your man Rod, though; he's found some festering piece of crap in a bin somewhere and he's conned these wankers into putting it in a gallery. I bet some fool will even buy it.


Comments

If you can pick it up cheap mate ship the bugger over! It's a doozie!!

Comment number: 006362   Posted by: Ragpicker on January 20, 2004 03:56 AM from IP: 203.173.20.178

You're right: the comedy just writes itself. This almost borders on self-parody, and if it were self-parody (on the part of the artist and/or the reviwer), then it might be art. Instead, it's just another example of how the art world makes me shake my head in disbelief. I just don't get it! I have to go look at some Vermeer now just to clear my head...

Comment number: 006363   Posted by: J.D. on January 20, 2004 10:02 AM from IP: 12.111.172.213

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