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Someone put eyeglasses on a museum floor, people thought it was art
05.26.2016
11:52 am
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It seems like something out of a movie. In fact, if there isn’t a scene in some Mr. Bean joint in which people mistake something for art, I’ll eat my hat.

A couple of teenagers at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art decided to place a pair of eyeglasses on the floor in one of the rooms just to see what would happen. Tentative visitors quickly treated the unassuming, er, spectacle, with the requisite respect owed to any duly accredited piece of conceptual or minimalist art.
 

 
On Twitter, the pranksters go by @TJCruda and @k_vinnn. After just a few minutes, a crowd of onlookers had gathered to investigate the unlabeled “artwork.” Seventeen-year-old T.J. Khayatan (@TJCruda) documented the public’s response on Twitter.

Conceptual art and minimalism are prone to this sort of thing. In 2001, a Damien Hirst installation consisting of a collection of beer bottles, coffee cups, and overflowing ashtrays was mistakenly tossed in the garbage by a janitor. Three years later at the Tate Britain, a Gustav Metzger artwork consisting of a bag of paper and cardboard was similarly thrown out, and in southern Italy in 2014, parts of a piece by Sala Murat were mistakenly discarded.
 

 
Just a few months ago, last autumn, an unruly installation by Sara Goldschmied and Eleonora Chiari at the Museion Bozen-Bolzano in Italy so resembled the aftermath of a riotous party—it consisted mainly of cigarette butts, empty bottles of champagne, and party streamers—that a cleaner put quite a bit of labor into tidying it up, prompting a memorable screed in the Spectator (U.K.) blog with the title “Hurrah for the cleaner who accidentally threw away a modern art exhibit.”

Before he started the band Pavement, Stephen Malkmus worked at the Whitney Museum in New York City as a guard—while he was there the museum displayed a work by the minimalist artist Richard Tuttle called “Ten Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself” that consisted of a few pieces of string placed on the floor. Malkmus has credited the piece as a contributing factor in deciding to start Pavement.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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05.26.2016
11:52 am
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Bea Arthur screaming ‘CONDOMS’ for 5 hours: The greatest minimalist composition of the 21st Century
02.25.2016
10:55 am
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You click ‘play.’

You marvel at the nearly audible brightness of the angular high-‘80s mall fashions sported by Bea Arthur’s alpha-Golden Girl Dorothy.

You reminisce about how shoulder pads and Aqua Net were that era’s great generation- and class-spanning feminine equalizers.

The repetition begins. You mildly curse yourself for clicking ‘play.’

You become annoyed, but you let it continue.

Becoming entranced despite yourself, you dim the lights and turn the volume up to neighbor-hate levels.

It becomes part of the background of whatever else you’re doing. You ponder the works of Reich, Nyman, Branca.

You think to yourself “This is no ‘Sheets of Easter.’”

You become annoyed again.

It’s no “Come Out” either.

Still, you keep listening.

You close your eyes. Hours pass.

YOU ACHIEVE SATORI.
 

 
h/t to Terry Andrews for this find!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
10 hours of Paul McCartney singing ‘Yesterday’
12-hour ambient music pieces from ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Alien,’ ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Star Wars’

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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02.25.2016
10:55 am
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