McDonald’s Pickle Flung Onto Ceiling Costs $10,000, Because ‘Art’
If Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 banana and tape artwork is dessert, this display is the entrée.
Sydney-based artist Matthew Griffin’s installation, Pickle, is as self-explanatory as it gets: it’s a single slice of pickle. The love-it-or-hate-it ingredient was peeled off from a McDonald’s cheeseburger and flicked onto the pure white ceiling of the Fine Arts, Sydney exhibition currently showing at the Michael Lett Gallery in Auckland, New Zealand.
The pickle is adhered only by the sticky sauce that comes with it, and the work has looked fresh since the day it was installed, the Guardian reports.
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In the artwork’s writeup, Pickle is described as a composition of “Regular Bun”—containing a whole bevy of ingredients including wheat flour, sugar, canola oil, wheat gluten, and yeast—“Beef Patty,” “Ketchup,” “Pickles,” “Onion,” “Mustard,” and “Beef Patty Seasoning.”
The kicker, though, comes from the artwork’s price: Griffin is asking for NZ$10,000 (US$6,260) for the obscenely minimalist piece.
Is this art? Did your choppers just kill a masterpiece-in-the-making? Pickle aims to spark a discussion about how the value of something, and whether it constitutes art, is defined by the people.
The piece will arrive with instructions guiding its new owner on how to recreate it post-freshness. The buyer will also have to fork out an additional NZ$4.44 for a new cheeseburger.
However, Ryan Moore, the director of Fine Arts, Sydney, insists that the pickle isn’t that high-maintenance. That’s no clear-cut way for how it ends up on the ceiling, since part of the joy comes from the journey.
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[via The Guardian and Newshub, images via various sources]
