Those of you voting to save it, why this particular piece of art? What’s special about it or would you feel the same about any work of art? Should everything that someone calls “art” be preserved indefinitely?
I don’t think I would have the heart to cut it up, but I agree with you.
This whole stunt sounds like just the kind of thing that an artist’s mind might conjure up. The act of cutting it up and distributing it could be deemed a work of art in itself, no?
Indeed I have thrown away some works of art that family members have made but then no one would care to vote to have them intentionally destroyed or saved or want a little unidentifiable wisp of it. A work by an established and deceased recognized great of which there are only so many of, that a museum would accept to display? Definitely on this side of the line.
Really though, I’d even find it disturbing to go to a simple community art fair, buy a painting that someone spent many hours painstakingly creating, with the intent to destroy it for the fun of the destructive process. Even if the painting was of no historic or serious artistic value. That is not the same as saying it needs to be preserved indefinitely; it is just not placing a value on its destruction.
In this case the choice is to make a donation worth about $15,000 to a museum or to instead go out of your way to destroy that potential donation. It really is in that sense pretty much saying that I have a 150 $100 bills in a pile. Just paper that only has value because we as a society have arbitrarily agreed that this paper has value. Lots of others of them around. Do we cut them up into 1.5 mm strips and distribute them or donate the pile? Is it better for me to have the kicks of causing the money to be shredded and to personally get a small unidentifiable strip or for a societal institution to get the whole value?
I can’t believe they took it out of the box.
And to all who say “it’s not unique”, as an art major who has done fine arts printmaking, and the husband of someone who concentrated and still works in the same, and owns a press: You don’t seem to really understand what you’re talking about. This type of print is an original, it is not a reproduction of another work. Also, due to the nature of the methods employed, it almost certainly differs in slight ways from the others in it’s edition. It’s a unique member of an edition of 50.
So, yeah, you can probably guess how I voted.
ETA: And any reputable fine arts printer will destroy the original matrix (in this case, the linoleum block) when the edition is finished. There aren’t any more where that one came from.
This.
Cut that piece of shit up.
I LOVE this Board!
I voted “no.” This thread reminded me that i had to go vote to donate.
BTW, Cards Against Humanity had me as a potential customer before this. We were talking about getting a set. That’s not going to happen now. They won’t miss me, of course, but damn.
The game is still good.
And they are not deciding to cut the artwork up; just letting a certain self-preselected group of people decide. The product is marketed as “for horrible people” after all … being mildly (but not excessively) transgressive is part of the schtick. Giving this as an option is an interesting bit which if nothing else is fodder for conversation about art and marketing.
Meanwhile I mentioned this to my visiting adult son, whose undergraduate majors had been in both studio art and psychology and who coincidentally is getting these gifts (the socks he got before coming to visit; the others are at home and he did not know this was one of them) and he is unsure how he will vote. Donating to a museum good … maybe they can sell it and use the money to buy something more exciting … but he sees a precedence in the art world to the “transformation” of one art into another and pointed me to “The Erased de Kooning Drawing” - artist Robert Rauschenberg About it:
Still that was with the participation and consent of the artist of the original piece. To do so without the explicit consent of the original artist … still feels like a violation to me.
And thinking about it the fact that it is Picasso makes me reconsider my stance … the man was a great but was also a shameless commercial machine producing assembly line style … there is some ironic justice to this end to one of his works.
I, for one, am not in the habit of deliberate destruction, whether it’s called “art” or “that old shirt that I can still wear while doing yardwork.”
Well, it’s only a Picasso, but it seems pretty clear that destroying it doesn’t bring the game-makers nor the recipients of non-descript pieces of the print ahead in any way.
I would prefer that they donate the print (assuming the museum has any interest in it), but I don’t think cutting it up it is a terrible thing – just pointless.
Adult son reporting in. Yeah so actually I personally come down more on the side of cutting it up, but not for the sheer fun of destroying something meaningful. Personally I think the world is just more interesting, exciting, and though-provoking in a universe where a game company in Chicago put it to a vote which decided to cut up a small picasso print and sent tiny uniform scraps of it out to a community of customers around the world. I mean, isn’t that a great story and doesn’t it raise more interesting questions than the work, itself 1/50 of an unremarkable run-- would do even sitting in permanent collection at the AI? Even though CAH is not doing this outright as an “artistic act,” in my mind this spurrs so many of the same lines of thought that drive modern and contemporary art–why do we value, cherish, or protect certain etched sheets of paper and not others? What exactly imbues them with this value? Would we know or care about this drawing if we didn’t know it was done by a famous person named Picasso and was sold of almost $15k? Who determines this value and what happens to its value if we cut one up? Does the 1.5mm square have any special value by the nature of being a piece of a Picasso, or is it now simply garbage? How do the people who receive these squares feel? What will they do with them? In the timeline where this happens there’s just so much more to think and talk about. In the timeline where CAH never got its hand on the print, let’s be realistic, it would probably languish in storage or some millionaire’s bathroom. Does not this novel alternative fate represent some form of conceptual value-added?
As DSeid mentioned above, I also feel there’s great artistic precedent for this type of act. A sense of intentional transgression just for the sake of starting a novel conversation, shifting a paradigm, or turning a sacred cow on its head, is a strong and important driver of modern and contemporary art. Another example I love in is the Italian artist Piero Manzoni who had his own feces industrially canned, labeled as Artist’s Shit and sold for its exact weight in gold. Even though CAH are not making themselves out to be motivated themselves by artistic inspiration, they are doing something in much the same vein that I feel many contemporary artists would actually get behind.
Lastly, I appreciate the fact that they are not outright deciding what happens to the print but simply setting up the social experiment. On their official page for the vote, they just lay out the two options and force the participants to decide. That being said it’s certainly subversive by nature–that’s what CAH exists to do–and I’m fairly confident their customer base is going to vote overwhelmingly to cut the print to shreds. We shall see tomorrow.
Truth be told, I would vote to cut it up and make the world more interesting, but I bought the hanukkah gifts for my gf and she decided to use her vote to save it 
I think Picasso would have voted to cut it up so me too.
I think Picasso is one of the most creative people that has ever lived. If you look at any of his collections the range of work from day to day is staggering. It seems that he would wake up one day and be a painter, then a sculptor, the next day a printer.
I love the story of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon the painting credited with starting modern art. Picasso painted it in 1907 but it wasn’t exhibited until 1916 because although Picasso had followed his creative urges he and his confidants didn’t know whether the result was genius or rubbish.
With that willingness to push himself I’m sure he’d be interested in the artistic effect of cutting up one piece.
Other cases and concepts from the art world for your consideration:
Banksy used some Damien Hirst paintings as a canvass, stenciling over them and displaying the result in a museum. This was presumably with Hirst’s blessing (though I don’t know for sure) but what would it mean if it wasn’t? Would it in a sense be more powerful? Would it be art?
http://www.artofthestate.co.uk/Banksy/banksy-versus-bristol-museum-044-hirst-roller-rat.htm
In 2008, artist Mat Benote snuck his own work without permission into the Guggenheim. In one instance, he used a Robert Morris installation as a canvass for his “added art” piece, Lost Boy Hiding in an Abstract Field
Not saying the CAH stunt is the same, just that they’re tapping into something that is very much out there. Subversive art, outsider art, graffiti. Acts of creativity that are not “sanctioned” by the institution. Does it disgust us? Why?
Of course they are responsible for it. Even offering the choice is the act.
And I don’t care if the game is good. They wanted publicity for their stunt; they’ve got it. And I’ll act accordingly.
Well, from my perspective, it’s just boring to do. There’s no intent behind it other than publicity. Since destroying art has been done to death by both the thoughtful and the thoughtless, the only way this act would appeal to me is if it had a novel intent.
Update
Thanks for the update, number one son.
Interesting that their vote went down pretty much along the same lines that people here voted and that the co-creator of the company considers this the “happy ending.” Although their 71.3 to 29.7 adding up to 101% makes our 79 to 21% look underachieving! :))
Incidentally, much of the apparent damage to the famous flag from Ft. McHenry that Francis Scott Key wrote about is actually from people cutting pieces of as souvenirs.