Reality Is Overrated

At New York’s Postmaster Gallery, artists Eva and Franco Mattes exhibit Reality is Overrated, an installation which includes two works that purport to tease the boundaries of law.

From the gallery’s press release:

The artists’ earliest work “Stolen Pieces” is shown here for the very first time : over a period of two years (1995-1997) Eva and Franco stole dozens of fragments of works of art – masterpieces by famous artists, such as Kandinsky, Duchamp, Beuys, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and Koons – from the most renowned museums of contemporary art in the United States and in Europe. For 14 years they have never revealed its existence. Besides the fragments themselves, the exhibition features a video, shot with a hidden camera, documenting their last heist. Making a mockery of our belief in the sacred nature of art, this controversial work is an open question: where does the value of a work of art lie? Are objects overrated?

For “No Fun” Franco Mattes simulated committing suicide in a public webcam-based chat room. Thousands of random people watched while he was hanging from the ceiling, swinging slowly, for hours. The video documentation of the performance, which was just banned from YouTube, is an unbelievable, at times very disturbing, sequence of reactions: some laugh, some are completely unmoved, some insult the supposed corpse, some take pictures with their mobiles. Notably, out of several thousand people, only one called the police.

Thanks to Erin Donnelly for sending this along.

Tags: Art Law, contemporary art and law, internet art, performance art, video art