Sep 14 2022 116 mins
A couple of months ago, a man disguised as an old lady in a wheelchair leapt up and smeared cake on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. This stunt was plastered all over the news and social media for several days, sparking international discussion.
We chatted about this at the time, and reached the conclusion that, despite the fact it was trending on twitter, we felt that it wasn’t really that controversial. This got us thinking about all the other art stunts from the past and what motivates people to make stunt art.
Art can be calming, connecting and inspiring but it can also be controversial, polarising and enraging. In this episode, we’re going to talk about some of the most famous art stunts throughout modern and contemporary art history, and how we feel about them. Join us in this BUMPER PACK episode for a lot of discussion, as well as live research.
In the first part of the episode, we give a little bit of context and define what stunt art is by noting the criteria of what might make a piece of work, stunt art.
From Duchamp’s 1917 upside down urinal, to Cattelan’s 2019 duct-taped-banana, we thought it would be fun to rank 22 different artworks that we feel meet this criteria.
Our tier rankings are as follows:
Tier A - gag
Tier B - ok i’ll admit it, this is good
Tier C - meh, simply could take or leave
Tier D - surely not
Tier E - get over urself
If you want to follow along with visuals for the ranking of the work, you can find the link to the video we recorded on our YouTube or on our website. It might be easier to follow this way, but we tried our best to ensure that it was also fun to listen to without visuals! This is a new format we’re experimenting with, so if you have any feedback, please let us know!
SO! Let’s find out if stunt art really is shit : ) Hope u enjoy xx
TW: we mention vomit, faeces + animal cruelty in this episode