What is art? We’ve seen it before, people leaving their glasses on the floor at a gallery and suddenly being labeled the next Duchamp. Ruairi Gray and Lloyd Jack, students in Scotland at Robert Gordon University decided to test the boundaries as to what people would fall for.
They succeeded. Not only was their pineapple photographed and shared like nothing else, the university placed a glass case over the top, protecting the sweet nectar from the greasy mitts of the plebeians.
A pineapple, costing approximately one pound at the local supermarket, was left sitting on a side table in the hope than some dickhead would jump on the modern art train and mistake it for brilliance.
Gray, 22, spoke out after the event “I saw an empty art display stand and decided to see how long it would stay there or if people would believe it was art. I came in later and it had been put in a glass case – it’s the funniest thing that has happened all year. My honours supervisor saw it and asked an art lecturer if it was real because he could not believe it.”
In the good spirit of the existing exhibits in the gallery, the cultural assistant Natalie Kerr decided to keep the piece on display, simply astounded at how students managed to get the casing onto the display shelf.
“We were moving the exhibition, and then came back after 10 minutes and it was in this glass case. It’s a bit of a mystery – the glass is pretty heavy and would need two or three people to move it, we have no idea who did it. But it’s still there now”
God knows how many times this prank must be pulled before people start seriously reconsidering the meaning of contemporary art, but at least this kind of art is cheap as chips and available at your local Woolies.
Via Independent.
