Break Down

I think most art is absolute shit. There’s too many artists that have too much food. But while watching a program on the BBC about modern art I heard about Break Down by Michael Landy and is was pretty intense. From Wikipedia…

Break Down, the work which put him in the public eye, was held in February 2001 at an old branch of the clothes store C&A on Oxford Street in London (C&A had recently ceased trading, and the shop had been emptied). Landy gathered together all his possessions, ranging from postage stamps to his car, and including all his clothes and works of art by himself and others, painstakingly catalogued all 7,227 of them in detail, and then destroyed all in public. The process of destruction was done on something resembling an assembly line in a mass production factory, with ten workers reducing each item to its basic materials and then shredding them.

Break Down, which was a joint commission from The Times newspaper and Artangel, attracted around 45,000 visitors. At the end of the process all that was left was bags of rubbish, none of which were sold or exhibited in any form. Landy made no money as a direct result of Break Down, and following it had no possessions at all.

That’s committed.