Boston performance artist Paul Richard's most recent show featured a
room completely empty except for a stack of $20 t-shirts for sale. At
a previous show, patrons filed past to watch the artist eating lunch.
San Francisco sculptor Joe Mangrum persuaded the city Art Commission
to let him disassemble his 1986 Mazda into a pile in the middle of
Justin Herman Plaza and call the sculpture "Transmission 98." For
this work, Mangrum was paid a $2,000 artist's fee from the city, part
of which he used to pay off $1,480 worth of outstanding parking
tickets he had accumulated with the car.
New York performance artist Bob Powers's recent works include one in
which he uttered a single sentence, "No, but I gave you a twenty,"
thirty times, and another called "Ode to a Buttered Roll": "How do
you do it? Sixty cents. So tall, so round, so many poppy seeds. Sixty
cents.... One corner deli owner tried to charge 75. Sixty cents." In
an interview in the Village Voice, Powers said, "I would be
thrilled if I got a $25,000-a-year grant for
the rest of my life. I don't want money for any lofty goals. I want it
just because I'm lazy and tired."
Finally, art students at Leeds University, accepting school and private grants of about $2,000, created a class project they said was "designed to challenge people's perception of art." By using the money to take a holiday at Spain's Costa del Sol resort, the thirteen students said they successfully raised the issue of whether there was any limit to what could be described as art. Most of the sponsors subsequently demanded refunds. But after the London Daily Telegraph, and other British newspapers reported the story, the students revealed it as a hoax. They had staged the vacation by acquiring tans at salons and taking fake beach snapshots. The point of the artwork, they said, was to demonstrate how easy it is to fool the press. No word on whether the sponsors still want their refunds.
