{"id":283953,"date":"2025-11-15T04:13:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-15T04:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/283953\/"},"modified":"2025-11-15T04:13:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-15T04:13:10","slug":"david-shrigley-is-selling-a-pile-of-old-rope-for-1-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/283953\/","title":{"rendered":"David Shrigley is selling a pile of old rope for \u00a31 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tAn upturned urinal, a spade hanging from the ceiling, an unmade bed, a banana duct-taped to a wall\u2026 and now a load of old rope. British artist David Shrigley<\/a>\u2019s conceptual installation, consisting of ten tons of discarded rope heaped on Stephen Friedman Gallery<\/a>\u2019s floor, is the latest work to question the value of art.<\/p>\n

Titled \u201cDavid Shrigley: Exhibition of Old Rope,\u201d the solo show opened on Thursday in London. The artist, who is known for his overtly simple paintings branded with even simpler logical fallacies, is the art world king of one-liners. And this show is just that: \u201ca pile of old rope.\u201d The work will set you back \u00a31 million ($1.3 million), which is a snip compared to the $6.2 million paid<\/a> for Mauricio Cattelan\u2019s readymade duct-taped banana last fall in New York.<\/p>\n

Shrigley spent months searching the UK for cast-off rope, much of which was destined for landfill. A lot of it had a maritime use \u201cfrom thick cruise ship mooring lines, to slim cords on marker buoys, long lines and crab and lobster pots,\u201d the exhibition text reads. \u201cOther have been salvaged from climbing schools, tree surgeons, offshore wind farms, scaffolders and window cleaning firms.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what message is the artist trying to convey? He said the show started with an idiom that old rope has no use. \u201cIt\u2019s also hard to recycle, so there\u2019s a lot of it lying around,\u201d Shrigley explained in the exhibition notes. \u201cI thought: what if I turn that into a literal exhibition of old rope. And then say, yes, this is art, and yes, you can buy it for \u00a31 million. The work exists because I\u2019m interested in the value people place on art, and the idiom gave me an excuse to explore that. I think \u00a31 million is a fair price, partly because of the idea and partly because it is quite a lot of rope.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a typically deadpan stance from him. The installation is like a physical manifestation of his work on paper, and it\u2019s easy to imagine the show rendered in his painting style; a rudimentary line drawing of the piled-up rope under the phrase \u201cMoney for old rope.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exhibition will polarize opinion, like most conceptual art, but its shock value will surely be dampened by the fact this kind of stuff is no longer surprising in the art world. \u201cReadymades,\u201d the term coined by Marcel Duchamp, have been around for more than a century, with the likes of Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, and even Pablo Picasso jumping on the bandwagon long before Tracey Emin\u2019s My Bed made headlines in 1998.<\/p>\n

The Guardian\u2019s art writer, Eddy Frankel, made a good point that I think is worth repeating. \u201cMaking a snarky comment about the value of art in a gallery that\u2019s struggling to survive financially (Stephen Friedman Gallery\u00a0announced some pretty huge losses\u00a0earlier this year) does feel a bit awkward, too,\u201d he wrote. \u201cIt\u2019s like Shrigley is saying: \u2018You lot would buy any old crap, wouldn\u2019t you?\u2019 Yet this is a gallery that\u2019s having quite a hard time selling any old crap.\u201d<\/p>\n

It remains to be seen who, if anyone, is willing to pay \u00a31 million for the \u201cold crap.\u201d But timing is everything, and with another eye-catching Cattelan work hitting the auction block this month in New York, his 18-karat, 100-kg golden toilet<\/a>, the appetite for conceptual art will be tested.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An upturned urinal, a spade hanging from the ceiling, an unmade bed, a banana duct-taped to a wall\u2026…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283954,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,129047,356,75,65135,129048],"class_list":{"0":"post-283953","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-david-shrigley","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-maurizio-cattelan","17":"tag-stephen-friedman-gallery"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}