Do you know the famous episode Vacanze intelligenti (Smart Holidays ) from the film Dove vai in vacanza , which stars Alberto Sordi and Anna Longhi as Remo Proietti and his wife Augusta, a couple vacationing at the Venice Biennale? At one point during the visit, the woman sits on a chair and visitors mistake her for a work of art. Lo and behold: something similar happened in an American museum (the video that captured the whole thing was tagged to the Guggenheim Museum in New York), where a visitor in the mood for a joke took off a shoe and put it in the middle of a room to see the... reaction of visitors. And right on time, some looked at that dirty and somewhat worn shoe as one would look at a work of art. Without neglecting, of course, to take photographs.
The video, uploaded by user smith_tok on Tiktok, quickly went viral and garnered him two and a half million likes, and thousands of comments, not counting of course how many people saw the video through the additional thousands of shares. “That visitor,” said one Instagram user trying to get something out of this epic troll, “changed something in an environment by adding an object that wasn’t there before and would probably have provoked reactions from the public. Not only did it spark interest, but now the general public is involved in a second level of engagement through a debate about its merits as art. This is art!” Of course, there are those who disagree (“okay, so could you bid on this genuine artwork?” another user replied to her), and those who consider this action a vivid example of the drift of contemporary art, those who consider it a demonstration of the concept of “perceived value,” while others interpret the public’s reaction differently (i.e.: maybe they photographed the shoe not because they interpreted it as a work of art, but simply to post it on social with the caption “what a stupid gesture”). And there are also those who remember that in the past a similar experiment was done at the MoMA in New York, although that time the protagonist was a fire extinguisher.
In short, joke without much pretension or useful find to talk about what art is, what it has become and what it will be? The discussion is open...
Below is the video:
She takes off her shoe and leaves it in a room at the museum: visitors photograph it as if it were a work of art |
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