Apparently not anymore:
A cleaner with the best intentions accidentally destroyed a piece of art worth more than $1 million when she removed what she thought was a “stain” from the installation. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t really a stain.
The piece of art, titled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings,” features a series of wooden planks and a (formerly) discolored plastic bowl. The artist, the late Martin Kippenberger, intended for viewers to understand that the bowl had been discolored by water running over the pieces of wood.
(H/T: Hot Air Headlines) I just had an interesting conversation with my wife over this. One that eventually led me to look up the topic of cycladic sculpture, which is pretty damn cool.
There’s power there, don’t you think? And it’s from a time that’s just out of the Neolithic period, too.
There is a piece at the Portland Art Museum that comes from the region now known as China. It’s just a pot…it would hold three or four gallons of whatever. It’s not particularly elegantly made – it appears to have been shaped without the aid of a potter’s wheel.
It’s 4500 years old.
And the thing that makes me think, is that the shaper decorated the exterior of this very utilitarian object. Again, the decoration is crude – a wobbly diamond cross-hatch pattern – but, when it was on display, I always like to look at it, and think about the human impulse to make things pretty. The shaper communicated their aesthetic to us in the here and now from the depths of time. And that’s saying something.