Sometimes you can see a trainwreck coming. That’s the case here, where an art installation that had advertised itself as a great place to take a selfie ends with predictable disaster.
That little collapse ended up damaging a reported $200,000 worth of art, via Hyperallergic:
The incident occurred two weeks ago at the 14th Factory in LA, a pop-up exhibition space conceived of by Birch, but the glorious footage was uploaded to YouTube today by someone who claims to know Birch personally.
“Three sculptures were permanently damaged and others to varying degrees,” Yu told Hyperallergic. “The approximate cost of damage is $200,000.”
Watching the video, though, it’s almost hard to believe it wasn’t staged. Who sets up art that valuable on what pedestals that are entirely unmoored to the ground? And then encourages people to walk delicately between rows that are essentially one giant set of dominoes waiting to be toppled. That’s just ridiculously poor planning, seemingly inviting just this kind of mishap.
Which, it should be noted, garnered the installation (and the artists involved) the kind of publicity that most pop-up art installations fail to get. That’s certainly a cynical view of things, but this is what we’ve come to now.
