100 million what!!!?



I know I havent blogged in a while.  These anger management CDs seemed to be working.  "Seemed" being the operative word.  Needless to say I have smashed them, burned them and pissed over their twisted plastic remains.  Its much more therapeutic to actually scream, rant, break something or punch someone in the face.  Anyway, I digress, so let me get to the point.

The nutter in question

So Chinese artist, Ai weiwei, has an exhibition at the Tate modern gallery in London. BBC Article here

What he’s done is dump 100 million sunflower seeds onto the floor of the Turbine Hall (some 1000 square metres of floor space). This moron isn’t just content with normal sunflower seeds... no sirree... these are 150 tonnes of porcelain seeds handmade and hand painted by south Chinese workers and brought over to the Tate (the seeds not the workers!).

You know how much I despise the art world. But this really takes the biscuit. 100 million seeds!!!! It beggars belief.

If we just work out what this means.  This is a very rough estimate to put things in perspective.  So you cost engineers and quantity surveyors please do not start picking at it.  You are free to do an intricate analysis in your spare time whilst touching yourself provocatively.... as i know you are prone to do.

Let’s assume that it takes someone a minute to mould and paint one of these things. I am not an expert but I assume they’ll also need to be fired in a kiln of some sort. Anyway 100,000,000 minutes is about 190 years. Now I am assuming that not one person did all these. He says it took about two years. Now I know its china and people are worked like dogs with little break and certainly no holidays; but for comparisons sake, I’m going to assume it has similar conditions to the U.K. So; to translate the 190 years of effort into something rational. 190 years are about 85 people working nonstop or 255 people on 8 hour shifts; for those two years. If we take lunch breaks, toilet breaks and breaks to laugh at the idea; it will be around 340 people. If we take off weekends it becomes 470. Factor in holidays, we have about 520.

520 people working on nothing else but this garbage. FOR TWO YEARS!!! I haven’t even included people to fire the seeds, pack them, transport them, deliver the raw materials, run the factory... etc etc. Or even costs of energy, water and everything else. Did these people work for free?

I would wager a conservative estimate of over a thousand people. A THOUSAND PEOPLE!!!! WORKING FOR TWO YEARS!!!!! Just so some idiot could get his picture in the paper. I would have preferred if his claim to fame was that he was crushed under a single 150 ton block of concrete (porcelain’s too good for him)

The thing that really pisses me off is that chief curator at the Tate, Sheena Wagstaff was quoted as saying it was a "beautifully simple idea that belies an extraordinary rich layer of meanings and references." What? Are you serious woman? More like “a ridiculously expensive prank that belies an extraordinary thick consistency of shit occupies the space my brain should be in” Do people actually get paid for saying stuff like this?

I worry for the human race… I really do.