An artist's latest work - a bottle of melted Antarctic ice - may have been stolen and drunk by a thirsty thief.Don't get all het up, Wayne! It was most likely just a thirsty literary type, parched by the profundities on display. Think how much worse you would feel if the contents of the bottle had "turned" yellow! Lots of luck with your insurance claim though, and I'll be glad to provide a replacement for a five spot plus shipping. You won't be able to tell the difference.
Artist Wayne Hill filled a two-litre clear plastic bottle with melted ice to highlight global warming.
But the artwork, valued at £42,500, went missing while on display at a literary festival, reports the Scotsman.
Entitled Weapon of Mass Destruction, it vanished halfway through the Ways with Words festival at Dartington Hall, Devon.
Mr Hill said: "It looked like an ordinary bottle of water, but it was on a plinth, labelled, described and in the programme of the whole festival.
"It was very, very clear what it was - a work of art."
And while we're feeling all arty, check out Chorus of loud boos:
THIS year's edition of one of Europe's top summer arts events has been described as a pretentious catastrophe after angry audiences booed or walked out of a series of performances.Some of the lowlights:
Critics attending the three-week Avignon theatre festival in southern France said it had plumbed new depths of intellectual obscurity and warned that a contempt for the mainstream public was placing the future of a national institution in jeopardy.
"What purgatory!" said the news magazine Le Point on its culture pages. "Loyal spectators are sad, disorientated and haggard." A commentator for the communist newspaper L'Humanite said this year's offerings were marked by "a triumphant sense of masturbatory autism".
But the most searing attack on Europe's most important drama venue after Edinburgh came from the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted an editorial to "the festival's worst crisis since 1968".
On Tuesday there were shouts of abuse during a show - part dance, part installation - by choreographer Christian Rizzo. Either the well was deep - a reference from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - was accompanied by a cacophony of electronic noise that the audience found unbearable.Good question.
A two-part work titled A lovely blonde child and I apologise, in which actors draped dolls of young girls in lascivious postures over coffins, also drew boos of derision and was accused of being an incitement to pedophilia.
"You think you've reached the last point in mediocrity, pretentiousness and confusion. But no. There is always something worse," said Le Figaro's drama critic.
...
Much of the audience walked out of After/Before, described as a piece of "theatre-dance-music-video" by director Pascal Rambert. The first 40 minutes are taken up by a film of interviewees answering the question, "If there were a huge catastrophe, a new flood, what would you bring with you from this world to the next?"
In the second half, 21 actors reproduce word for word the quotes from the film and then, having stripped off, perform them a third time in song and dance. "What have you got against us?" a spectator was heard to shout as he walked out in exasperation.
