Box City

Potter's Field

Smothered Art

Artists often face the necessity of disposing of old works, especially those whose monetary value has sunk to zero. Too often, artists put off the task because it is a tedious, difficult, and heart-rending job. However, it is possible to destroy, mutilate, and otherwise do away with art in a variety of ways that relieve the task of its monotony. When the instructions are carried out carefully, they may even result in a new and quite different artwork. Each product of this recycling can be seen as an abject monument to the original "smothered" artwork now obscured within the new work. Some of the more popular methods developed by the Museum of Forgery include:

Suffocation
Sampling
Papier maché
Paring/Skinning
Chaining
Mulching
Dragging
Beating
Starvation
Swatches
Burning
Casting
Freezing
Barbecuing
Canning
Ventilating
Drowning
Launching
Hanging
Poisoning
Pancaking

Introduction

Part of the Museum's mandate is to examine the conditions under which individual works are allowed to exist as art, or are excluded from that field. By extension, it also examines the process by which works cease to exist as art. With this in mind, the Museum set up a virtual graveyard-cum-reliquary for unwanted art in 1995 called Box City. The two main areas of Box City are Potter's Field and Smothered Art.

Potter's Field

Potter's Field is a free burial ground for art that is too impoverished, friendless, or "worthless" to be entombed in a museum, including both original works and fakes of all kinds. It is so named because, like the traditional potter's field, it serves as a public burial place for the poor, the unknown, and the prohibited. Currently, the Museum of Forgery's Potter's Field can only accept digital artworks, which are entombed together within a single JPEG that changes as new works are buried in the same virtual field. This image stands as a visual marker for all the buried works and is inscribed Tomb of the Unknown Art. The Potter's Field also serves as a conceptual model for real-world burial grounds that could be established to respectfully dispose of the 99.99% of all artworks that never make it into a permanent collection.

Research findings: Shortly after the Potter's Field site was set up, attendants discovered that decomposition of art does not occur in a straightforward way. Several works that were dug up for reburial due to partial collapse of the underlying strata were found to have migrated from their original positions. Moreover, it appears that they had been cannibalizing or colonizing one another. Museum researchers now speculate that art has strongly viral properties and is probably not an aesthetic form at all.