Remember last February, when a clever worker went viral for “fixing” an unsightly hole in his office by hanging up a plaque that made it look like a piece of modern art in a museum? Well, he’s not the only one proving that one man’s trash is another man’s high-brow art. Recently, a Cambridge University postdoctoral fellow Lizzie Swann asked her husband, Tomas McAuley, to stop leaving empty wrappers on the kitchen surface—a common gripe among married couples.
In response, her husband placed a paper plaque on next to it indicating that it was, in fact, his most recent artistic expression.
Me: Husband, please stop leaving empty wrappers on the kitchen surface.
Husband: pic.twitter.com/BdfFCVVN4R
— Lizzie Swann (@LizzieSwann1) March 26, 2019
The piece, which is aptly entitled “Provocation,” is a stunning mixed media piece consisting of “outcake wrapper on marble.” According to the description, McAuley is part of the “famed ‘Annoyes’ school of visual artists,” and his works have “long sought to shock and disturb, but ultimately deepen our collective understanding of the human condition.”
This particular piece seeks to probe “the intersectional boundaries of art to question, with an urgency that echoes the uncertainty of our Zeitgeist, the limits of acceptability, culpability, and conceivability, using the translucency of everyday materials, transfigured in the purifying flame of creativity, to show, in a world marked by division, the fundamental elision of the artistic and the human.”
Swann posted her husband’s masterpiece on Twitter on Tuesday, it’s really struck a chord with other married couples everywhere. Which, after all, is the very purpose of art, is it not?
This is hysterical and exactly the sort of thing my husband would do if he’d ever bothered to come to an art museum with me.
— Minor Baroness of Prussia (@RobinFalco) March 26, 2019
It also appealed to people who actually frequent museums, because, let’s face it, we’ve all seen plaques like this next to an “exhibition” of a toilet seat or crushed can of Coca-Cola.
I’ve literally been to exhibits like this. https://t.co/ywJnZjEhCE
— Jennifer West (@Westjet007) March 27, 2019
Swann posted a follow-up tweet to say that her husband, a fellow academic, responded to going viral by saying, “the depressing thing is, this is probably now the most widely-read thing I’ve ever written.”
Husband: ‘the depressing thing is, this is probably now the most widely-read thing I’ve ever written’
— Lizzie Swann (@LizzieSwann1) March 26, 2019
That’s to be expected, though, as we all know that art thrives in spontaneous bursts of profound absurdity. And if you’re an art lover yourself, don’t miss these 25 Mind-Blowing Secrets Hidden in Famous Works of Art.
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