Callithump!

I’m full of ideas. Some good, some not so good. Some I’m keeping to myself to use later. Some I’ll just never get around to do anything with. Today, I’m going to start sharing the latter.

Idea #1: Art in or with Phone Booths

Why it’s a good idea: I don’t know where to find them, but I’m betting if you could find out, you could buy a phone booth for cheap. Like cigarette vending machines when Clark Whittington was starting Art-o-mat, phone booths are highly functional objects that are being made irrelevant by changing times. People use cellphones now, and booths are becoming increasingly hard to find. Think of the creative potential if you had one of these and it’s liberated from its original purpose! When the door closes it triggers a switch that turns on a light. You could modify this to activate any number of electronic devices. The space is large enough to encase a large human or two, while being small enough to fit inside a building. Meanwhile, they’re weatherproof, so you could do an installation outside. They’re soundproofed to a degree as well, so it would lend itself to incorporating sound into the piece.

Beyond the sheer functional possibilities of phone booths as art objects, they’re symbolically charged artifacts. Phone booths are a sign of a changing culture. There was a time when people could assume a right to privacy, even in public places. The phone company actually provided tiny, private rooms that people could go into, close the door, shut out the world and have a conversation. This was seen as something valuable enough to public space were provided for it. Where are these private spaces now? With the loss of these spaces, we also seem to lose the idea that there are things that should be private. There was a time when we didn’t have to listen to half conversations about disgusting medical conditions, broken condoms or bad breakups while trying to enjoy our chai lattes. Beyond all that, think of the phone booth itself. A used phone booth may have been in use for decades. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of phone calls took place within those confines. They ranged from banal to life altering. If there were batteries that could store the emotional energies of those conversations, they would have reached atomic bomb levels of power by the time the booths were retired!

Things to do with the idea: Personal space, communication, privacy, respect, change… all good material for art explorations! A phone booth could become an art gallery, giving private showings. The phone booth itself could become an art object. Take out the phone, put in a comfy seat, change the lettering on the outside from “phone booth” to “calm” or “alone time” and just provide people with a place to go and take a break from the world.

The phone booth as a creative tool seems so obvious. Artists should already have done many projects with them, and yet a Google search provides surprisingly little about the subject. I did, however, come across this wonderful site, the Payphone Project. It started out as an art project involving payphones. As the availability of payphones has declined, the site has become an aesthetic appreciation of the payphones themselves.

Could it be too late for such a thing? Are all the phone booths already scrapped? I hope not. There’s still a lot of creative potential to be explored. Get on it!

iBanksy is a vending machine created by iArtistLondon that sells stencils of Banksy graffiti and a can of spraypaint for just £9.99!

When it comes to ideas striking the right note, this is a complete symphony! It might be just a hoax, but even if it is, it’s still a brilliant idea.

What does it mean when the work of an artist whose work sells at auction for upwards of £1 million can be reproduced by anyone with a stencil and a can of spraypain? What is relevant about the art? Is it the content, or the artist? What is “real” art? It’s not a simple question. One might assume that an “authentic” Banksy would mean that he cut the stencil and spraypainted the wall himself. This particular standard of authorship is far from universal. Most of the grand masters had teams of assistants working for them. A painting by Monet might actually have been done by Team Monet, with the majority of actual brush strokes made by anonymous assistants. Since Banksy encourages people to appropriate his images and reproduce them however they see fit, couldn’t these faux Banksys be seen as his assistants, and all reproductions of Banksy’s work real Banksy? If Banksy himself cut the stencil and handed it to someone else to spray, would it be real? If Banksy bought a stencil at JoAnn’s Fabrics and stenciled it himself, would that be real?

At the same time, we’re actually assuming that there is a real Banksy. Banksy chooses to remain anonymous. Banksy could actually be a group of people claiming to be the same individual, like Alan Smithee. Further complicating matters is Banksy’s own ambivalent attitude toward authenticating his (or her or their) own work. Pest Control, the allegedly official group that authenticates Banksy’s work, has this to say:

‘[Banksy] would encourage anyone wanting to purchase one of his images to do so with extreme caution, but does point out that many copies are superior in quality to the originals.

”…Banksy has a casual attitude to copyright and encourages the reproduction of his work for your own personal amusement, so it’s with regret that he finds himself having to deem pieces either “real” or “fake”.’ (source)

Which is all just to say, we need vending machines like iBanksy in the world, to raise such questions in such a fun and interactive way!