apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Create Art!

It's like buying art of sorts---hoping to have one of the first and hoping that it will become very collectable and will be a conversation work in your home. Probably small museums are buying them up also.

With pieces like these, context is everything. A scorched & rusted multicolor oil drum like this (with, let's say, a 1-inch glass top) placed on axis in the center of a blinding white minimalist foyer furnished with only a Helen Frankenthaler on the wall and an all-black Louise Nevelson in a corner--or, conversely, in the sumptuous foyer of a Beaux Arts apartment from 1910, with heavy moldings & parquet-de-Versailles floors--could look great. But put the same rusty barrel in the foyer of one of today's overgabled cookie-cutter suburban mansions and it would look like a wino at a wine-tasting party. No one would even make eye contact with it, and if they did, they'd politely avoid mentioning it. And in the illegal loft squat of a bunch of cutting-edge art students it probably wouldn't even be noticed.

And that goes double for the shopping cart hack. Chicago's homeless population brought that particular art form to perfection a long time ago. The main difference between their customizations & this one is attributable to whatever cachet derives from the fact this shopping cart chair comes from an ARTIST in PARIS. It's Duchamp all over again. How revolutionary.

These are OK I guess. Magnaverde's image of the oil can in the McMansion is still stuck in my head. Akk!

There is a guy in Seattle who creates whimsical animals from old oil cans.

http://www.homegardenart.com/recycled_metal_animals.html

I long for a chicken.