ART ATTACK !

“Too much perfection is a mistake.”

There is no intrinsic difference between 'failed' works (i.e. those that remain unsold because their makers are unable to persuade a gallery to promote them in the market) and those which become art upon the realisation of an exchange value. But what if the work with which an “artist” and an audience are engaged does nothing for the economy? Such work does not feature under the umbrella of 'the Arts', it is necessarily dismissed — as amateur, as avant-garde, as 'not art', and so forth.

Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting and untwisting the same rope. Texts never introduced as mere additions to or illustrations of a main text because there is no main text – only an assortment of subtexts.

This text is a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse unworkable examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures. Watch and be amazed as we bring to life eccentric and even intricate perpetual motion machines that have remained steadfastly unmoving since their inception. Marvel at the ingenuity of the human mind, as it reinvents the square wheel in all of its possible variations. Exercise your mind to puzzle out exactly why they don't work as the inventors intended.

(TOO COOL 3)

"It is to be remembered that all art is magical in origin - music, sculpture, writing, painting - and by magical I mean intended to produce very definite results. Paintings were originally formulae to make what is painted happen. Art is not an end in itself, any more than Einstein's matter-into-energy formulae is an end in itself. Like all formulae, art was originally FUNCTIONAL, intended to make things happen, the way an atom bomb happens from Einstein's formulae."

(W. BURROUGHS)

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