Friday, August 15, 2008

It's a turd! It's a plane!


Paul McCarthy, whose art I have in the past found to be basically stupid and infantile, (although not as much as Paul McCartney's) topped himself with a giant inflatable dog turd the size of a house to be installed in the garden of the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern. I'm guessing the museum literature used the words: "abject", "transgressive", "subverts", "problematizes", "critique of capitalism", and "critical eye at our notions of art". And "shit", to be cute. Tee hee.*

Unfortunately, the artwork, entitled Complex Shit (no, seriously. Although the blog Anorak got off the great line: "Oh, complex shit. Not complete shit. Silly us."), wreaked havoc when it became airborne and flew some 200 metres before landing near a children's house, smashing some windows. Local press was quoted as saying: "Oh, the humanity!" Luckily, there was not a large crowd at the museum, so the shit did not hit the fans.

For the sake of poetry, I would like to believe that the giant inflatable dog turd landed right in front of a child who dreams of one day growing up to become an artist whose work is evocative, intelligent, and aesthetic. And that she will already be too mature to be impressed by this shit.
(*And, yes, I get that a giant inflatable dog turd is funny! But, after you've been following contemporary art for about 20 years and seen exactly 47,539 variations on this same shtick, the joke gets really old.)

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