At the 2005 Venice Biennale, Northern Irish artist Nicholas Keogh took to the waters of the Grand Canal in a homemade motorized gondola. Constructed from a crude jumble of domestic and industrial junk, including a bulky outdoor garbage container, a stained and battered bathtub, and some rusty oil drums, Keough’s Bin Boat, 2005, was a ridiculous but nonetheless viable vessel. The artist and his creative partner Paddy Bloomer piloted through the city with noisy, impertinent disregard for the decorum and tradition of the Venetian waterways. Bloomer and Keogh’s amateur boat-building venture—essentially,