@Alice Bad news, Alice. The water cooler photo actually is art.

@Alice @tezoatlipoca Awesome photos! The experience of the mundane…

@Alice Staring at art that isn’t art?? I do that too! This is me at the Louvre 😊
#louvre #paris #art

@Alice Ah. In art galleries I've been known to spot someone being too ostentasiously "arty" and stop near them while saying to my companion "Ah, but if only he'd been able to draw a horse that looked like a horse".

@Alice When I went to grad school an advisor came into my studio to look at my work, paused, and asked about a bunch of black wires dangling from a nail in the wall near my computer...

Advisor: "Oh, so what is happening here?"

Me: "That's where I keep my USB cables."

@Alice My favorite piece: What is a Man? The repetitive visual of neutered icons that, in the public sphere, represent one version of "man" as advertisement for the expectations of a culture of an idealized stolid figure, emotionless, standing stock still - the irony of man as inanimate, and unanimated, a cartoonish rendering of what "man" is supposed to be. Juxtaposed against the most basic defining inelegant function of humanness - the shared toilet room - what we cannot contain we are involuntarily forced to excrete. A toilet room that does not appear to contain its function, its symbolism seeping out past the walls and onto the floor, staining it - as proof that despite the confines of imposed definition, humanity in all its unique insistent messiness will prevail.

Ta da!

This is how I got through art criticism in college.

@Alice

okay but you’re basically the artist and the audience at the same time, and that’s a whole mood. museums need more chaos like this, fr.

@Alice

this is ironic genius, impaired stuff!
brava!!

@Alice you think it's funny, wait until you visit a wax figure musreum and you are innocently watching an exhibit and notice a couple old people looking at and discussing you.
Then you know how that poor stepladder in the museeum feels.

( 😁 )

@Alice Once in the Zachęta gallery in Warsaw the husband has been taking photos of beautiful light switches, the old gallery guard lady protested with "this isn't art"!

@Alice
It could be fun to play museum guard for some of these things

@Alice Once in school, teacher gave us 90 min. to draw a picture on the theme "Me at School". So I went to the student council room (my favorite room there) and drew it. After about 85 minutes my picture was finished, but unfortunately, it didn't include any people. I'm not good at drawing people.
So, in the last few minutes, I just drew a hole in the floor and a hand sticking out of it.
The teacher was deeply impressed bc of the meaning he could see in the hole and the hand

@Alice What do you mean, it isn't art? Everything can be art, depending on how you look at it. Random objects are the best art ever.

@Alice Next time bring some didactic panels along with names like "Untitled Contemplation #45" so you can stick them to the wall and keep people guessing long after you've been there

@Alice but seriously, that drinking fountain photo IS art.

@Alice

there has certainly been enough modern art that had things like bricks on the floor, a collection of mops/brooms, etc. that were supposed to be exhibits. why not expand the field? :)

@Alice

Too tired to make up an equivalent Thomas the Tank Engine story this time. I'll see if I get inspired later.

@Alice My wife and I were in the Art Gallery of Canada about 20 years ago. Faced with a blank white wall, I commented, "oh, I guess this isn't installed yet."

She says, "no, it's there."

I point to the metal running along the base of the wall, from one end to 2/3 of the way across the space. "No, it'll be something that plugs in; look, they've run conduit."

"No, that's it."

I step closer, and I see the tiny little sign. It's a piece called "Khayman," consisting of something like 44 little lead bricks about three inches long, all in a row.

@Alice Hah hah. "No, that's a trash can" -- Wonder Woman.
https://www.wordingart.com/2020/12/wonder-woman-1984-trash-can-art/

@Alice they're art, though, & your photos have made them moreso. :)

@Alice
This is SO YOU, Alice, and so delightful.
You are one of us, one of us!

@Alice I do that too

@Alice with eyes, a pout, and a pointy hat.

@Alice

This was essentially my Intermedia Art class in college. I put a piece of tape around one of my bottles of red OPI nail polish, submitted it as “found art,” titling it “Passion, Contained.”

I received an A grade on the piece.

@Alice I adore your whimsy. It makes me smile every time. Thank you for brightening my timeline.

And your photo composition is quite good, nice work.

@Alice and all of these things are art in how they reflect, expose, and make a statement about the whole culture and environment that created them and placed them there. Maybe they are missing something. Maybe we all are.

@Alice

I heard about someone who set up a laser across the street to project a red dot through a window onto the wall of an art gallery. Then they went inside and put their own information plaque next to the dot, making it an art piece.

@Alice This is art!

@Alice You thought step stool, I thought hand truck until I noticed the wheels and bottom plate are missing. Either way, it's a controversial sculpture.

@Alice "this piece is symbolic of man's need to escape homogeny, to be reborn through the fires of hell..."

"...sir, that's a fire alarm."

"IT'S INTERPRETIVE!!!!"

@Alice The art museum version of starring at something imaginary in the sky while making expressions... just so people look for it.

@Alice Dada 101

@Alice this is art.

@Alice Next level "stop and smell the flowers" 💐 ❤️

@Alice

If art is made by talking about it, then you're an artist. If nobody talked about the Mona Lisa, the Louvre would be using it as a draught excluder, probably to plug that hole where thieves got in to steal the bling. It's all in the definition.

@Alice For decades I’ve wanted to make a gallery exhibition of different fire extinguishers.

A fire should of course break out there too, as part of the show.

@Alice A friend and I did this at the museum in Oakland back in the late 60’s. We were admiring a coiled up fire hose in a red cabinet on the wall in the art section. People gathered behind us. I started thinking about making one of those little cards they put next to the art piece describing it, and sticking it on the wall there. But I was young and easily distracted, so I didn’t do it. Maybe that cabinet is still there…