Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: MODERN ART IS RUBBISH

by Hazed

It's a cliché that modern art can be mistaken for trash. Jokes/urban legends circulate about how somebody assembled a collection of junk intending to be thrown away, only for some art critic to declaim that it is magnificent, darling!

Now, real life imitates art... or real art imitates jokes... or something, as scrap metal turns to art and then back to scrap metal.

David Williams from Manatee County, Florida is a retired contractor, and in his copious spare time he now creates sculptures out of recycled materials and scrap metal. He takes junk and he turns it into art, searching for materials in dumpsters and junkyards for bits of steel he can shape, mold and weld into something interesting. He's made chairs, mobiles, sculptures, even a giant bird feeder that looks like a flamingo.

But just before Christmas, thieves made off with three large pieces of artwork from his front yard - it must be thieves, plural, because the art weighed about 300 pounds. The items taken were a tall, vase-like sculpture, some large, heavy chairs, and a thing with triangular rows that holds a glass globe.

The irony is that police think the artwork has been sold for scrap metal, thus turning it full circle.

Which is a shame, because the scrap value would have been about $40 or $50 whereas the value of the pieces as artworks was considerably higher.

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