That’s art — sorry, Art — you’re looking at there. Dave Barry came across it at a Miami Beach art show, and he couldn’t make any more sense of it than I can:
…a ratty old collapsed armchair – worn, dirty, leaking stuffing, possibly housing active vermin colonies. I asked the gallery person if the chair was art, and she said yes, it was a work titled “Chair.” I asked her what role the artist had played in creating “Chair.” She said: “He found it.” [pic]
Dave further notes that “Chair” (actually “chair”, otherwise known as “Untitled (ellipses) II”), by brilliant scam artist Rodney McMillian, is for sale: a mere $2800. I wouldn’t touch the feculent thing for twice that, but here is one James Scarborough blurbing in artcritical.com:
Rodney McMillian’s work limns absence as an unmitigated presence. His take on absence is more sensuous than cerebral. He doesn’t deconstruct the idea of absence and then rebuild it as a dialectical opposition which posits that what’s not seen, felt, experienced is as significant, perhaps moreso, as that which is. […] The subject… is not our reaction to a void but our innate tendency to venerate the void itself as something sacred and iconic. […] As a repository and sum of former posteriors that have dented its cushions, of previous elbows that have grazed the armrests, the chair offers not a weedy patina of desuetude but an apotheosis of its former occupant.
Uh, what? I’d get those innate tendencies looked at, mate. The comedy just writes itself here, and I don’t care if I am shooting fish in a barrel: these idiots are funny. My hat’s off to your man Rod, though; he’s found some festering piece of crap in a bin somewhere and he’s conned these wankers into putting it in a gallery. I bet some fool will even buy it.
