How many of you kids reading this article graduated from the International Baccalaureate program of your high school?
Cool! We did, too. Though it was probably not as rewarding as our school officials sold it to us when we began the program, we did make an awful lot of nerdy friends during it. We were also forced to have a lot of thought-provoking discussions.
We often had to look at pictures or representations of museum pieces and decide whether we considered them to be art.
Did it have to be by a professional artist? Did art only exist on museum walls? What if someone named a urinal “Fountain”?
Art. It’s all art. Everything is art. Theory of Knowledge was nearly a pointless class — until this weekend.
Actress and space queen Tilda Swinton started her own performance art at the Museum of Modern Art. People went nuts. She first performed this piece, titled “The Maybe,” 18 years ago in London.
All the piece shows is Swinton “lying on a mattress in a glass box, apparently asleep.” The description card reads, according to the New York Times: “Living artist, glass, steel, mattress, pillow, linen, water and spectacles.”
It’s a random piece, meaning the museum staff will only be notified the day she decides to perform it. It’ll happen six more times, according to Vulture.
The Vulture article continued to say it was as if people were beholding an Egyptian mummy come to semi-somnambulant life. “Oh, she twitched!” “She’s breathing.” “Oh my God! Is that that movie star?’”
“Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real — shared — time: now we see it, now we don’t,” read the MoMA’s statement.
So, what do you think? Is this art? Or is this a nap? It seems a little pretentious to us. Maybe that’s the point. Where would we be in this world if movie stars didn’t do slightly offbeat art experiments?
“Even better is the wonderful possibility that museum visitors might come here, see a movie star asleep in a case, accept it as some kind of art, get super excited, and wonder how on Earth something this strange got started,” wrote the Vulture article. “And they’d rush upstairs to the greatest collection of modern art in the world, let themselves go, and add their thinking to the group mind.”
It doesn’t sound like the fairytale dreamland The New York Times paints it as, but it doesn’t have to be a waste of time either.
Arguably, this is one of the more tame performance art pieces that we’ve ever heard of, mostly because it doesn’t contain any public nudity or other weird things.
(The reviewer from Vulture also reviewed one of those exhibits. “I don’t remember seeing this many breasts in a museum gallery since the last retrospective of the nineteenth-century French academic painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and those were on canvas.”)
Good luck, artists. Keep doing weird things and one day you might be like Swinton — asleep in a glass box in public.
