Gigantic tub of 22,000 Perler beads

Singing? Interpretive dance?

What I find insufferable is artists debating Art versus Craft.

As much as I love (and make) Art, and love Artists, I have to say:

  • The Art v. Craft debate generates much heat with inversely scant light, inspiring in me the most exquisite tedium I could ever wish to completely and permanently avoid.

  • Craft people never debate. Why bother? Just keep making Craft. Because Craft. Now that’s Art.

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That’s my mom… but her reasoning has to do with nostalgia. She has a couple of wall-mounted curio shelves, the ones built up with many small compartments. They’re filled with tiny toys: cars, figures, etc., but none broken. I was like, WTH, and she told me that the toys once belonged to numerous relatives – all children. Donated? Gifted? Nope. She’d find them when visiting relatives… on the floor, “forgotten” (her working assumption)… so why not “rescue” the toys for the children so that, in later years, they could see their “lost” toy and fondly look back on forgotten parts of their childhood; that was her explanation. I didn’t buy the entire story, and told her that she had actually stolen the toys from the kiddies; she didn’t (and still doesn’t) see it that way: All toys eventually end up lost and forgotten. Whatever. Still, she has managed to turn a bunch of potentially lost toys into something like an art project… although one based on theft.

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What? Oh, that is priceless …! You should write this up as an essay or short story or something, shop it around to Atlantic Monthly.

It feels like a lost scene from a Harold Pinter play … no, not Pinter (The Birthday Party), too dark … maybe Pinter’s characters in a Tim Burton movie.

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My motives … well, who ever really know their own motives?

But I remember distinctly how the broken arm brought forth my tender sympathies.

The plastic was very shiny and new, and fluorescent pink; and the monkey is in this one-arm-hooks-up, one-arm-(now-missing)-hooks-down posture.

I think he was maybe a party favor meant to be linked in chains with other like-minded hot-sixties-fluorescent colored monkeys. Or maybe he was meant to hang from your cocktail glass, let other people know that your Mojito is guarded by a hot pink monkey, so watch out!

If the arm had been intact? I’ll bet that I would merely have said, Ooo shiny pink plastic, I should roll up a joint, enhance the effect. (You know, like in Blade Runner: “Enhance … enhance … zoom in … enhance …”)

But that missing arm … snapped off just about the elbow … oh, I felt that monkey’s pain all right, so I needed that joint pretty bad.

Update: Similar to this:

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Mime?

If you must. :wink:

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I liked reading the history, here: Barrel of Monkeys - Wikipedia

including

Use in models

These Monkeys have also been used for modeling of polyhedral structures, including virus particles and other protein structures [10] In brief, a pair of monkeys can hook around each other in more than eighty different ways, forming quite stable links. The links may be either symmetrical or asymmetrical. Repetition of an asymmetric link generates a helix. A symmetric link is self-limiting, so that the structure cannot grow further unless a new link is used to join symmetric pairs. It is possible to generate structures with point, line, 2D or 3D symmetry by choosing two or three different links (from the 80 or more possibilities) and repeating them systematically. An enormous number of compatible combinations can be found by trial and error. Many are shown in the sources quoted above.

Any repeating unit can in principle be assembled in this way. The only unusual characteristic of the monkey is that its arms, legs, hands and feet are able to twist around each other to form many stable links. In this, they resemble protein molecules which can also link together in many ways. The resulting assemblies simulate biologically important structures, but their symmetry follows general geometric principles. The monkeys provide a ‘hands on’ approach to understanding these principles. Barrel of Monkeys is also called as Bandar Keela and is famous in south Asian countries.

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