On a Tuesday in October...
Illustration
On a Tuesday in October 2001, the pricey British artist Damien Hirst assembled an artistic display in the window of a London gallery. It consisted of a collection of half-full coffee cups, ashtrays with cigarette butts, empty beer bottles, a paint-smeared palette, an easel, a ladder, paintbrushes, candy wrappers and newspaper pages strewn about the floor. The work was the centerpiece of a limited-edition art exhibition and was showed off at a V.I.P. preopening party that night. As "an original Damien Hirst," the display had a sales value of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The next day, however, it was dismantled and discarded by a cleaning man who thought it was garbage.
"There were a lot of people here smoking and drinking and just hanging out Tuesday night," the gallery spokesperson said. "And when we came back Wednesday morning, we realized that someone had come through and, well, sort of tidied up."
The cleaning man, Emmanuel Asare, explained, "As soon as I clapped eyes on it, I sighed because there was so much mess. It didn't look much like art to me."
Fortunately, though Asare had stuffed everything in trash bags, they had not yet been picked up. The gallery owners retrieved as much of it as they could and, working from photographs made the day before, put it back together. The artist, far from being upset, found the incident "hysterically funny." Asare will keep his job, said the gallery's spokesperson, and she suggested there was a deeper meaning to his custodial act. It could, she said, "encourage debate about what is art and what isn't, which is always healthy."
The resurrected work of art has been made as identical to the original as possible, but there has been one addition: a sign nearby reading "Keep Off." (Source: Warren Hoge, "Art Imitates Life, Perhaps Too Closely," The New York Times, October 20, 2001.)
Some look and see only a mess. Some look at the same thing and see great value.
"There were a lot of people here smoking and drinking and just hanging out Tuesday night," the gallery spokesperson said. "And when we came back Wednesday morning, we realized that someone had come through and, well, sort of tidied up."
The cleaning man, Emmanuel Asare, explained, "As soon as I clapped eyes on it, I sighed because there was so much mess. It didn't look much like art to me."
Fortunately, though Asare had stuffed everything in trash bags, they had not yet been picked up. The gallery owners retrieved as much of it as they could and, working from photographs made the day before, put it back together. The artist, far from being upset, found the incident "hysterically funny." Asare will keep his job, said the gallery's spokesperson, and she suggested there was a deeper meaning to his custodial act. It could, she said, "encourage debate about what is art and what isn't, which is always healthy."
The resurrected work of art has been made as identical to the original as possible, but there has been one addition: a sign nearby reading "Keep Off." (Source: Warren Hoge, "Art Imitates Life, Perhaps Too Closely," The New York Times, October 20, 2001.)
Some look and see only a mess. Some look at the same thing and see great value.
