Monday

February 12, 2001

Dad's amaryllis that cousin Larry gave him...

As euphoria subsides, as people who bought a hundred shares of Dell give up dreams of wealth, as the conversation turnes to the gap between the luxury house cost overrun and the declining portfolio...that's the time to examine the material world.

I have this Associated Press story about a British artist who is doing a huge conceptual piece in London. He is having everything he owns pulverized into dust. But first everything is being carefully cataloged and weighed. (And surely filmed, it does cry out for a movie. Shot with someone else's camera and miniDV stock, of course.) The artist, Michael Landy, will emerge with blue overalls, underwear and black shoes. And a girlfriend to live with. Because presumbably his coffee pot (oh, British, make that teapot) is going to be pulverized. He doesn't, according to the AP, "plan to live a minimalist life forever. Consumerism, he says, is a never-ending ride with no emergency exit."

"I'm not pretending that I can escape consumerism. That would be ridiculous," Landy is quoted as saying by AP. "I'm not doing this to cleanse myself. I don't feel like that at all. I am an artist. This is an art exhibit."

So...what this man owns is art. If pulverized to dust. And, he hopes, buried under a shopping mall. Some of the stuff is actually pieces of his own other art...pieces from conceptual art pieces and one painting by someone else valued at $30,000.

Have you ever thought about how many individual things the average person owns? Especially if you take that individual thing literally. (Each pair of socks? Each sock?) I'm constantly trying to rid myself of a few things. Or at least clean off a flat surface in this office. But I bet that we have 10,000 things in this house. Even if you don't count every scrap of paper and every old newspaper. And every sock.

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Work. Deciding where my energy can best be used. Banging my head against problems, irritating fellow sufferers more than helping them?

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Dot com-ing out. Dot com-edy. It's all been said, huh? But you know what? No one ever invited me to one of these dot celebrations. My own company, like many, has been guilty of producing its own silly events. (I realize I had a dream the other night that I was to receive a 'very special award' in one of them. But I work for a company that was post-IPO twelve years ago when I arrived.)

But a buddy of mine invited me to a relaunch of a dot com with a new name. There were free drinks, cheese cubes and other food. There were community leaders and venture capitalists. Confident-looking founders and shaken-looking techies. It was in a disco. I'm not kidding. Someone has constructed, obviously at great expense, a disco.

I hope they are successful. My buddy is a nice guy. He is enthusiatic about it.

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Anyway this whole divesting of stuff as art has me fascinated. Perhaps I'll make a 'box lot' and sell it on ebay with you, my few but devoted readers, watching. It will be art. Cool. The only thing is, I don't like mailing stuff. So I'll have to insist that whoever gets it picks it up. It probably won't sell. But you never know.

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We didn't dot com long. We came home and had some wine and some lamb and watched the Monday night TV programs FFP likes.

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