Day-to-day activities should not count as art

There’s a guy in Washington, D.C., who’s selling trash to people. Only he isn’t calling it… There’s a guy in Washington, D.C., who’s selling trash to people. Only he isn’t calling it trash, he’s calling it art.

According to the BBC, artist Chris Goodwin takes pieces of trash that he finds in refuse bins and dumpsters around the D.C. area, encases them in small plastic shells and sells them out of gumball machines as Trashballs for a quarter a piece. I’m not making this up.

The article says that he quit his corporate job to work at a company called Junk in the Trunk (still not making this up) to facilitate his Trashball project, which has already sold more than 9,000 pieces around the D.C. area. For those of you who don’t feel like doing the math, 9,000 pieces at 25 cents comes out to roughly $2,250. For selling trash.

I apologize if I sound uncultured, but I really don’t understand modern art. The mere fact that some guy can buy a couple secondhand gumball machines, fill them up with garbage and start selling them to people as a “social commentary” just baffles my mind. But then, I could probably say that about most modern art I’ve seen. Every time I go to the Carnegie museums I somehow end up in the modern art gallery, and every time it just makes my brain hurt. For example, there’s a piece there now which consists solely of a bunch of broken glass panes stacked on the floor. Titled “On Corner-On Edge-On Center Shatter,” the description says that the piece is “radically separate from traditional works of sculpture.” Well, I’d have to agree with that. The way I see it, most works of sculpture require some sort of artistic ability, whereas all that this piece required was some glass and a sledgehammer.

And this isn’t the only modern “art” piece that I think is trash – pun intended. For instance, there’s a British artist named Mark McGowan who apparently exists for no other reason than to provide me with material. In one performance art piece, he randomly keyed 47 cars in several areas, then took pictures of the damage and hung them in a gallery. Before that, a few of his other projects were to sit in a tub of baked beans for 12 days with sausages wrapped around his head and french fries up his nose, and to crawl around the streets of Manhattan wearing a George W. Bush mask and a sign on his back that said “Kick My Ass.” Sadly, I’m not making any of this up, either.

But this doesn’t include my favorite stupid art story of all time, concerning a piece of art called “The Lights Going On and Off.” A piece by artist Martin Creed, it consisted entirely of an empty gallery room, in which the lights turn on and off at five second intervals. Instead of seeing the piece for what it is – some guy turning the lights on and off – the Tate Gallery of London (one of Britain’s largest and most respected art galleries) awarded him 20,000 pounds. That’s almost $40,000, for an empty room with some faulty wiring. Never have I had less faith in the human race.

Now, I’m not saying that all art is stupid. There’s quite a bit of modern art that I think is really neat and does have some sort of merit. What I am saying is that I think artists have a bit too much license to pass off whatever they want as a piece of art. I mean, according to the criteria set above, I could break into someone else’s house, fill it with rotten garbage and then take photographs while I flipped lights on and off, and it would be one of the greatest and most influential pieces in history: a poignant social commentary on the meaning of home and the world that we live in today. Instead of what it actually would be, which is a house full of trash.

So I’m proposing a new set of criteria for judging art. No longer is anybody allowed to pass anything off as art if they didn’t do something that most people never do in their lives. Thus, painting a beautiful landscape would still count, as would complex pieces of sculpture that actually required some forethought and ability. However, flipping light switches, breaking glass and mocking the president wouldn’t count, because the vast majority of people do those sorts of things every day. I’m not so sure about sitting in a tub full of baked beans with sausage wrapped around your head, though, which is why I think a second important criterion would be mandatory mental health testing on the part of the artist.

In the meantime, though, I’m going to go throw rocks at windows and call it a performance piece. Who knows, I might even get a prize. Although I should probably turn the lights off, too, just to be safe.

Do you regularly stuff french fries up your nose and sit in a tub full of baked beans? E-mail Richard at rab53@pitt.edu and tell him about it.