George Brecht composed "Drip Music": "a source of water and an empty vessel are arranged so that the water falls into the vessel."

He'd write an "event score" -- "printed on a small white card that he would mail to friends.... Mr. Brecht said that he did not care if any of his event scores were realized and that he did not think that there was a correct way to perform one."



Back in the 1950s, when Jackson Pollock was painting (doing things with paint), you had to ask yourself: What is the next step? First, Brecht tried painting "using chance operations and materials like bed sheets, ink and marbles." But it's better -- is it not? -- to rid yourself of the paint altogether, and then rid yourself of the work itself: Just write a brief description on a card.

In those days, there were no blogs. But it was like blogging, no? A few words on a blank white rectangle are enough.

And yet, there are all those serious people in that video clip with their microphones and watering cans. Are they any less annoying than mimes? And if you're going to perform this minimal, quiet music, you've got to find a space that isn't horrifically overwhelmed with the mechanical noise of a forced air system that drowns out the dripping.

But the dripping goes on whether you hear it or not, and now the last drop has dribbled out for George Brecht, the Fluxus artist.

Dead at age 82.

The iPhone app that costs $999 and gives you a tiny gemstone icon that opens to a larger glowing image.

I Am Rich.

Apple removed it. But why? Is it a fraud?



It is what it is.

Created by iPhone developer Armin Heinrich, the original blurb for the... download read: "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this… It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all."

It's perfect conceptual art, now, isn't it?

ADDED: I paid 99¢ for the very charming Koi app.

Yes, it was a tad ridiculous to pay $8 million for it...

... but now it isn't even it anymore. You've just constructed a replica of it... and therefore: a monument to your folly.

It was a delicate undertaking, one that required rubberized protective jumpsuits, long tables of medical equipment and more than 224 gallons of formaldehyde. The goal: to replace the decaying tiger shark that floats in one of Mr. Hirst’s best-known works of Conceptual art, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.”...

[A]s a result of inadequate preservation efforts, time was not kind to the original, which slowly decomposed until its form changed, its skin grew deeply wrinkled, and the solution in the tank turned murky....

Mr. Hirst acknowledges that once the shark is replaced, art historians will argue that the piece cannot be considered the same artwork.

Yes, exactly.

“It’s a big dilemma,’’ he said. “Artists and conservators have different opinions about what’s important: the original artwork or the original intention. I come from a Conceptual art background, so I think it should be the intention. It’s the same piece. But the jury will be out for a long time to come.’’

People have often asked me how I could go from art school to law school, art being so far removed from law, so very unlike it. But, no, it's not, is it? Original intention. What a wonderful phrase for finessing your interpretation! And may I suggest to Mr. Hirst the notion of a living artwork? Now, that could get you everything you ever want.

What did He do? (Not miscapitalized!)

Conceptual art marches on:

An artist that came to Buffalo to perform in an exhibition tracing the development of Chinese conceptual art is now in trouble with the law after trying to perform another stunt.

He Yun Chang, 38, of Beijing sat in a plexiglas box filled with concrete up to his waist on Friday in front of the Albright Knox Gallery totally naked.

Wait! Wasn't he kind of wearing concrete pants? Boxy, concrete pants...

Saturday afternoon, Chang decided to perform another stunt.

State Parks Police say Chang stripped off all his clothing, tied a rope around his waist to some sort of an anchor and walked out about 40 to 50 feet towards the brink of the falls.

Police believe that his plan was to stand out in the water totally naked for 24-hours.

Chang even had a staff member from UB and several people filming the stunt until something went wrong. The rope that was holding him from slipping into the rapids came untied and he had to wade back towards shore.

That's when a tourist spotted the naked man in the water and called police thinking that he may be suicidal.

Tourists! Such philistines!

I can't believe this artist.

BBC reports:

An art work purportedly made from excess fat from Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has been sold for $18,000 (£9,862).

Switzerland-based artist Gianni Motti claims to have bought the fat from a clinic where the leader had a liposuction operation performed....

"I came up with the idea of because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi," Motti told Welwoche magazine.

We're asked to think the artist thought this up entirely independently of the widely known film/book "Fight Club." What do you think that bar of soap in Brad's hand is?

Whoever bought the thing is a fool for buying conceptual art where the concept is already extremely well known from a previously existing art work.

Drawing from the nude model.

The NYT tell us that "trendy artists" are subjecting themselves to figure drawing sessions again. But is this really new?

In the market where these contemporary artists ply their trade, the age-old discipline of drawing human figures is considered a rather fuddy-duddy exercise. Although figurative painting and drawing has always maintained some presence, in recent years rumors of its demise were rampant, as video, installation, and conceptual art rose to the ascendant.

Though figuration has recently made a comeback, hand-in-hand with the burgeoning popularity of painting, the art-world laurels still tend to go to those who package their figuration with a conceptual gambit - like John Currin's devastating grotesqueries, which often skewer precisely the types of people who can afford to buy them, or Elizabeth Peyton's romantic portraits, celebrated because they're fashioned at her own pleasure rather than a patron's behest.

Oh, human beings will never get over the human figure. How absurd to imagine they would! Abstraction and conceptual art could die out, but we can never lose our love of the human body and our desire to gaze upon it.

I suppose there is some chance that photography could serve this human need so completely that artists would cede the subject to lens-wielders. But if they ever did, the next artist would come along and seize the opportunity. There are always things you can do with pencils and paint that can't be done with photography. You don't necessarily need to gaze on a live nude model to do figurative artwork, but it's an inspiring practice:

Most say the sessions have influenced their work, although not necessarily in obvious ways. Ms. Essenhigh, who was standing at an easel at the back of the room making strong, muscular pencil drawings, said that life drawing was great for "keeping your chops up." It serves "to prevent yourself from being clichéd, from your hand always going with the same thing," she explained. (Since she began attending, the figures in her paintings have gone from flat to volumetric, and her aesthetic has changed to match.)

My undergraduate degree is in Fine Arts, and I've spent many hours drawing from a live model, both in art school and in evening sessions here at UW. With a model taking a pose -- which is hard to hold for a very long time -- you feel a strong, shared concentration, and intense attention to your own drawing results.

That is, if all goes well.

It can also be tiresome to draw from the model. You may think it's always going to be interesting to look at a naked person, but many people who try to be artist's models are not very good. You need an interesting body and an ability to find a good pose and hold it. The artist can move around looking for a good angle on a pose, but with some models there are no interesting angles. Try drawing a thin man! The best models are overweight women -- like the woman in the photo at the link. One reason I stopped doing the evening drawing sessions here at UW was that nearly all the models were thin. I mean, if I want to draw landscapes, I'd go to the mountains, not the plains.

Hallucinogenic carpeting as art.

If I were in NYC, I would love to see the big Grand Central carpet-installation-as-art-installation that is written up in today's Times. The vast expanse of "hallucinogenic blue-rose-patterned carpet" is the work of Italian conceptual artist Rudolf Stingel. But really, this reminds me of the artist who got the bright idea to dye rivers green, when in fact Chicago annually dyes its river green. If you want to see a vast expanse of floral patterned carpet in deliberately crazed hallucinogenic colors, you can go to the Monona Terrace convention center in Madison. (Picture of the carpet pattern.) But I don't mean to knock the NY installation. I think it's cool to take something normal (floral carpet), make it less normal (make the colors a bit strange), and put it where it doesn't belong (Grand Central). I especially like that it will entertain and amuse and cushion the ordinary people that use the terminal and didn't ask to have art imposed on them. It is the opposite of the sort of art that means to "challenge" people and imposes on them in a place they have no choice but to use, like the "Tilted Arc" and the "Tumbling Woman."

"Tense, frowning Beethoven-ness" in Madison. Here's a strange and incredibly arty thing happening in Madison of all places, as reported by the NYT:

... Norwegian conceptual artist Leif Inge digitally elongates a recording of [Beethoven's Ninth Symphony] to make it last 24 hours. The piece slows symphonic time so that movement is barely perceptible. What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche. Yet the symphony remains somehow recognizable in spirit if not in form, its frozen strings fraught with tense, frowning Beethoven-ness. ... The slowness eases you into a trance, but the layers of dissonance make the experience slightly uncomfortable.

Mr. Inge created the piece in 2002, and he is now bringing it to America. Tomorrow he will discuss it and play excerpts at Free103point9, a gallery in Brooklyn, and on Friday it will unfold in its full 24-hour glory at the cavernous Theo Kupfer Foundry and Ironworks in Madison, Wis. ...

Theo Kupfer Foundry and Ironworks? Never heard of it, and I've lived in Madison for 20 years. Well, here's an article about it in today's Capital Times:

When John Martens took his first look inside the cavernous industrial building at 149 Waubesa St., he was overwhelmed by its beauty and potential.

"I truly got weak in the knees," said Martens, a local restoration architect.

No mention in that article of "9 Beet Stretch," the glacially paced Beethoven the Times says is playing this Friday.

I resent that. So I sent an email to someone who had recently emailed to say he was using a new email address from now on. I realized my mistake and resent the email to the new address. Before he got the second email, he replied that I'd used the old email address, which caused me to email him and say, "I resent it."

That's absurdly open to misunderstanding! Don't you write "resent" for "re-sent" all the time without noticing it might make you seem resentful? But hyphens have a way of falling out of words. "Email" is a prime example. I see Sharp Points is trying to preserve the hyphen in email (based on the fact that the "e" is a pronounced letter, not a legitimate syllable), and maybe the French have a problem with it (because it's their word for enamel), but that hyphen is just not going to survive.

But if you drop hyphens or close up words that were once two separate words, you may end up writing something that other people will see in a different way.

I went 30 years without noticing that "Superbowl" could be read as "superb owl." When you know what's supposed to be there, you don't see the alternatives. It's probably a good mental exercise to try to see alternative images in common agglomerations. You could do conceptual art based on such things. Typical observations of this kind are that "God" is "dog" spelled backwards, or "justice" could be split into "just ice." Look for new ones. I will, and I will keep you posted.

Oh, here is one more, which occurred to me once when I was having trouble painting. (I'm the lawprof who went to art school.) The word "painting" can be broken into "pain, ting!" A "ting" is "a single light metallic sound, as of a small bell." That seemed to express something about the utter insignificance of the pain painting was causing me. Ting!