Posted on 11/23/2008 7:26:49 PM PST by xjcsa
Another University of Northern Iowa graduate has burst onto the New York art scene. News of Lotta Sales has been found in a number of art journals, and she recently had a very favorable review of her work in the Village Voice. Her excursions into Quantum art have become an East Coast sensation.
Recently, I reported the latest about Justin Case and the Refusalist movement he started. During the heady days at the University of Northern Iowa, now referred to nostalgically as “The Case Era,” Lotta was just another “Iowa kid” searching for a major. She had come to UNI to become a teacher, but when she saw what Case had done, and read about the principles of Refusalism, she changed her major to art.
The principles of Refusalism are, as all good art movements must be, simple but intellectually gratifying, allowing one to think without actually thinking. Case realized that since modern art was largely ugly and unskilled, and could be produced by almost anyone, it must be a cognitive and emotional activity.
Case theorized that art must be a mental exercise and as such could never have an adequate physical representation. Therefore, true art could only be visualized by the artist but never actually produced. The artist must “refuse” to produce the physical expression of the mental exercise.
Lotta Sales, after graduating from UNI, gravitated to New York and found some success producing Refusalist art. Her specialty was very large blank spaces, because her concepts were very large and expansive.
Lotta had produced a piece titled “Three Nudes,” which consisted of nudes whose bodies were mirrors. If you could look at one, you would have seen only yourself. The piece was very popular with female activists.
Sales’ movement into Quantum art came after a bad personal experience.
She had just broken off with her latest girlfriend when she passed by her own art in the museum. Looking at the blank wall, she saw three nudes, but their bodies were now blood red instead of mirrors.
“How could this be?” she thought.
Once an art piece is produced in Refusalism, there is nothing in the philosophical foundation to allow the concept to change; a concept is a concept. Lotta realized that the mental image could change, but more important, the concept may never have been fully developed or complete at any given time. The best that could be said was that the concept was in some sort of probabilistic space that could only be resolved by an observer, but an observer was impossible because the art was Refusalistic.
Fortunately, Lotta had not spent all her time in art and elementary education classes, she had also taken a course in physics and realized that a piece of Refusalist art actually existed in a probabilistic time relationship that could be approximated by Born’s interpretation of Schrodinger’s wave equation.
Hence the term “Quantum art.”
Sales caused a sensation in the New York art community when she produced a piece of art titled “Schrodinger’s Box.” First, she conceived of 50 different pieces of Refusalist art. Refusalists, of course, are very prolific. She numbered them and then an assistant, using the data from an astrological chart, picked a number. Without Lotta seeing the result, the nameplate for the piece identified by the number was placed within a closed box.
An art critic in New York said the following, “Sales’ art is the essence of genius, the personification of Refusalism, ironically not in the refusal, but in the teasing of objectivity. What art object is in the box? Each is in a state of suggestive and tantalizing probability. Sales takes the bold and seminal act of placing a handle on the box, tempting, almost seducing, the viewer to grasp it and open the box, and in so doing, resolve the quantum state of the art.”
“Yet, if a viewer is so seduced and was to open the box, the act of observing would resolve the paradox, reducing the art and the box itself to just another profane object. Without the paradox, the art disappears!”
“What is in the box? Sales’ response was both profound and profoundly tantalizing. “There is nothing in the box. There is everything in the box. It is art, and it is not art.”
The piece sold at auction last Friday for $2.4 million. The new owner will not say whether he will open the box.
thankfully she changed her major to art... we have enough dumb people that had teachers like her
It is crap.
L
LOL!
No this is not art and it is not new. It as been done before about 25 years ago.
I did a web search for “Quantum art” and “Lotta Sales” [apropos moniker] and found nothing. This is a joke, eh?
Yeah, it's satire. Check out the link I posted at the bottom of the story for another column on refusalism, by the same author. It's quite good.
Quantum stuff seems to be catching on. Just goes to show what a large following 007 has.
This article may be satire, but the NY and London art world is nuts you can’t tell reality from satire.
A NYT Magazine cover article several years was about an art dealer who sold as art, among other things, used tampons. I am not kidding!
Then there are the excrement artistes, this one among many:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/dec/04/art
my parents live right down the road from a professional artist named Dan Gerhartz...he’s pretty good at his trade...
Lesbians make the best artists.
AND pancakes. So get in the kitchen little missy!
I had a cat once.
It lived in a pretzel (logic) box.
It was a Cheshire/Schrodinger mix named Metaphysicleese who may or may not have been smiling, if, in fact, it ever existed.
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