'Artist' Michael Landy, who is famous for once destroying everything he owned - which is now apparently a foolproof fast-track to international recognition - has launched his latest artistic malapropism: a 600 cubic metre perspex box, known as the 'Art Bin', into which he is encouraging members of the public and better known artists to toss their 'failed' art. At the end of the exhibition, the contents of the bin will be sent to landfill.
Landy has described it as 'a monument to creative failure', presumably unaware of its imminent status as a monument of creative failure. A friend of mine kindly described it as 'a waste', although did concede that 'the first instance of waste occurred some time ago' in the production of the original 'artworks'. I personally have no qualms with the notion of gathering together a vast collection of modern art, from a selection of the world's most renowned artists, and then throwing them all into a landfill, where they will be crushed and buried, never to assault the senses again. If pushed on the matter, I would prefer for them to be recycled, and turned into something more aesthetically pleasing, like a bottle, or a drawing pin. But if you're going to launch a ceremonial destruction of modern art, I don't want to hear about it; it should be a personal, cathartic act of righteousness, in which no man should share. In the act of publicising his destruction, and by granting it the label, 'installation', Landy has surpassed himself, and the rest of the modern art world, in it's desperate race to out-cunt itself. Never, in the long, rich history of shit modern art, has an artist plumbed such unfathomable depths.
If there's anything good to come of this, it's that such an act may herald the dawn of a new post-avant-garde-new-wave-futurist era in which the modern art world will slowly begin to eat itself. Perhaps ten years from now it will have wiped itself out, as in a final flurry of genius, artists will burn all existing works and fling themselves from the nearest high point as part of a global installation 'exploring the limits of human experience while reflecting the transient nature of our times, and the merging of man and nature...yadda yadda'.
Here's hoping.
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