You are supposed to know not to touch art in an art exhibit, but beyond that you should obey the barriers placed in the exhibit. If there’s a rope around something you don’t cross the rope. If there’s a case around something you don’t touch the case. If you can fade the art with flash photography there should be a sign saying not to take pictures with flashes. If the art is vulnerable to loud noises, again, they need a sign.
Art that is vulnerable to the negative reactions of critics it pretty tough to protect. Obviously for all I know someone kicked the art and that’s why it broke, but taking the story at face value makes it pretty hard to blame the critic.
I was chatting with the (rather brilliant) Chief Scientist at the Corning Glass Museum, who said that all glass shatters eventually, the rate is Weibull distributed (which make my mathy heart happy).
That made sense… (to me, which might not mean much, but I trust Dr. Cook )
Does anyone know how long the piece had been displayed at the location where it was destroyed? We can theorize about whether the piece would have eventually self-destructed, but the fact is that it was on display for some period of time, presumably longer than the time the critic was in proximity to it. Within moments of the critic approaching the art piece, it fell apart. Which is why I’m leaning towards cause-and-effect, rather than coincidence. I reject the proposition that just because an artist created a fragile piece of art, it is their fault when someone else’s actions cause it to break.
If someone approaching a piece of art on display causes it to break, why is it on display? That could have happened to anyone viewing the art. Sounds like a money grab/scam to me.
If an artist feels the need to make a sculpture of finely-balanced glass cobwebs held together by friction (or whatever), they by all means should. Only, if that work is exhibited just as if it were a conventional bronze, then the artist and/or gallery is being kind of a jerk. Some things just physically aren’t going to survive forever, and it’s a dick move to wait for some hapless art mover or gallery visitor to breathe on it wrong and then pretend they owe you thousands of dollars for being a clumsy thug. You can attach as much mystique to the work as you want, it doesn’t change physics.
Anyway, in this case it sounds like the art-world people are all having fun with their self-involved drama so no harm, no foul.
Nah, plenty of artists are quite practical – some of them are engineers – and plenty of them employ people like me to work out how to make, display, store and transport their work in practical ways. But ultimately fine art is whatever it is, and maybe it can be put on a plinth somewhere and maybe it can’t. If you want something that comes with a hook on the back by definition, that’s what the much larger decorative art market is for.
I’m under the impression that all art that looks like this is just a way to launder money. No one likes it, it’s just a case of the “emperor’s new clothes”.
To me this reads as “things that happen have to happen at some point.” There’s a (apocryphal?) story about the first bomb dropped by the allies on Berlin killing the elephant in the zoo that a stats teacher I knew used to use to illustrate the problem. If you took the area of Berlin, the lethal range of a bomb to an elephant and dropped the bomb randomly, the odds it kills the elephant are minuscule. But the odds of it landing anywhere were minuscule and it had to land somewhere.
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