So my friend sent me an email yesterday with this article from the Washington Post. It kind of goes with a post I did a couple days ago in the ‘what is art’ vein. The work is called ‘Stolen Pieces’ and literally is that, a case full of stolen pieces of other works, “snatched or snapped off by the duo over a two-year crime spree. The artists did the deeds between July 28, 1995, and July 29, 1997, in museums all around the world.”
Now I don’t know but to me this isn’t art as much as, yes, a two year crime spree. I will let you read the article but one thing stands out to me. The writer says “As budding radicals, it does seem as though Eva and Franco Mattes wanted to give the finger to the art world and art history, with its hero worship, its veneration of dead objects, its stale preciosities.” The history of art and its stale dead objects is a direct line to our beginnings. It leads back to the very beginning of time and without that line what do we have? It is really a true history in that it can't be rewritten according to the whims of whatever current world power or, for that matter, the Texas school board.
In her email my friend added “is stealing pieces of other people's work a creative impulse? It seems to me this is just an attention grabbing device without any creative side to it.” Exactly, I have to totally agree with this. When i read the article that was the first thing I thought of and now, reading it again, it is the one thing that sticks in my head.
Honestly I never was one to think about what art is. I was so involved in my own art and the history itself that i never took the time. But i seem to have this thought provoking friend who likes to make me think. Thinking isn't always a bad thing i guess but I’m starting to ramble on here. One thing I do know, as an artist, if I found these other supposed artists prying something off a work of mine I think I would have to break their dirty thieving fingers.
But that is just me.
tuneage, Lily Allen - 22
