I got yer instant art, pal

Maud Newton links to story about “crap art,” which is described as follows.

Carnegie Mellon University graduate student Tom Murphy challenges musicians to write, record and mix an entire album in one 24-hour period “preferably with no sleep breaks in-between.”



Murphy founded Crap Art project and is busy perfecting the movement’s manifesto. But why 24 hours?



“The idea is to force constraints on the artist and to get away from the writer’s block that you can be faced with when you try to create the perfect artefact,” Murphy said. “It gives you a good kick in the pants to get something done rather than sitting around and agonizing about it.”

Or what you could do is take all the interesting events that happened in the last 24 hours and try to squeeze them onto 21-inch-tall paper sheets; and when you’re done doing that, you come in tomorrow and start over, and yesterday’s art becomes today’s litter box liner.


Finally, that which has always eluded us: permission to say “I’m an artist” when somebody’s spouse at the newsroom Christmas party asks “and what do you do?” And when asked what you create, you can say “crap” and move the conversation on to more interesting things, like all the misused intransitive verbs you found last week.