“The Destroyed Print”
Pratt Manhattan Gallery
Jeff, a New York artist, made a print of himself seriously ill from the toxic effects of a material he was using to make his art, and sent it to some hundred artists, asking them to destroy it and to return the results. In other words this is a vanity piece, or, more politely, a self-referential piece, about the quite concrete suffering of the artist, and it gives a lot of other artists a chance to practice instant, on-the-run creativity. This is not just Novelty Art, but the worst sort of self-exploitation to achieve self-importance. A lot of the artists just tore up the piece and sent it back