Occasional blogging, mostly of the long-form variety.

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

You Sure It's Not April Fool's Day?


(Click for a larger view)

This may be my favorite story of the year so far. The headline title, "Huge inflatable art piece escapes museum, wreaks havoc," is good enough. But it gets better when you read the actual story. The lede had me laughing out loud:

Flying piece of art causes museum chaos in Switzerland
Mon Aug 11, 3:26 PM ET

GENEVA (AFP) - A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled "Complex S(expletive..)", is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres (yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children's home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display.


(The artist.)

Clearly, this further supports my push for more funding for the arts.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know why I read that as "Paul McCartney".

LOL!

Way to go, Bat. The world needs more stories like this. :-)

Comrade Kevin said...

It probably costs more now that it's broken than it did when it was in one piece.

Fran / Blue Gal said...

It was on Olbermann tonight! Thanks Bat.

Batocchio said...

Haha. Really? I'll have to hunt down footage!

Fran said...

Hilarious!

Anonymous said...

Wonder how many people saw that and thought "oh, shit."