I linked to this story earlier today on my Culture Blog. And then I had supper at Perry’s earlier this evening, consisting of the leftovers from the Blogger Bash on Saturday, and I told him about it. He laughed, so here it is here. It’s from the Guardian, which has a Strange Things section:
In Romania, local media report that the country’s “first” institution of higher learning, the University of Arts, in Iasi, was the scene of an official investigation this month after police removed the corpse of a man believed to have hanged himself on the campus. Builders and students at the university had initially mistaken it for a modern work of art.
According to Reuters, the body hung for a whole day in a sculpture-laden garden building that had been re-opened for repairs before onlookers twigged to what it was and called the cops.
Cue commenters with stories about how granny went to sleep in Tate Modern and got confused with an exhibit. These are old gags now, in fact they go back to Duchamp’s Urinal, but as long as Art goes on being ridiculous, they will go on being funny.
The first story about stealing street signs was interesting, I knew someone who’d engaged in a bet to purloin the longest and most unusual street names in London, like “Shoulder of Mutton Alley” and “Bleeding Heart Yard”, he had them hanging in his hallway.
I did visit the Tate once and saw the famous pile of bricks “art”, the other exhibits were all in little square rooms, one was actually a bunch of floor tiles, you could see people wandering around looking for the exhibit, when they were standing on it.
A while ago, a friend and I had a little competition to come up with an entry for the Turner Prize. I finally had to concede defeat when he suggested his masterpiece “One Cubic Metre of the Atmosphere”.
Here is a very similar story from almost a year ago.