Yours for £1 million! David Shrigley displays 10 tons of ancient rope at exhibition | Art and design

HHow long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can’t answer that, but he can tell you its weight: 10 tons, apparently. His latest installation is an exhibition of ten tons of ancient rope, which he collected over months and left in towering hills at this lavish gallery in London’s Mayfair. Most of them are marine ropes, intended for landfilling. It seems that these things are difficult to recycle, and there is an endless amount of them lying around the world. So Shrigley collected as much of it as he could, collected it and put a high price on it.

The business could be yours for £1M. And that’s the point of the show: This is money for an old rope. It’s not that deep, it’s just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, a term taken too far, and a pun taken too literally.

Shrigley made his name through deadpan, easy-to-understand visual statements: simple paintings with simple phrases written on them, just a collection of dark, self-deprecating but often funny non-sequiturs. And that’s exactly what it is, a non sequitur joke, with no punchline. Just an idea and a price.

And it looks great! Largely because it looks very much like any other conceptual art installation. Piles of discarded trash have been a common sight at art galleries for decades, but these are the first to do so in an ironic and knowing way. It’s as if Shrigley is bravely admitting that this is all a bit stupid.

The problem here is that, at its core, this is about the value of art, what people are willing to pay for an idea, and which ideas have value and which don’t. But I don’t think the monetary value of art is that interesting. Who cares if someone wants to pay millions for a dirty old bed, a light that turns on and off, or a rotten banana pinned to the wall? What rich people do with their money is no less important to me than what they eat for breakfast.

Making a caustic comment about the value of art at a gallery struggling to survive financially (SFG reported some heavy losses earlier this year) seems a bit awkward, too. It’s as if Shrigley is saying, “You’ll buy anything old, won’t you?” However, this gallery has great difficulty selling anything old.

Maurizio Cattelan, the artist now famous for creating a golden toilet that was stolen, made a similar point — in a more aesthetically poignant way — when he taped a banana to the wall at an art gallery in 2019 and sold it for more money than anyone should spend on a banana. But that was at the time, when the art world was more prosperous. These days, when things have become more cautious, I don’t think ideas about the financial value of art are as clear or clear as they used to be.

Despite all this, in a very Shrigley way, the work is charming and engaging. I look at you wandering into a fancy art gallery and trying to think deep thoughts over the piles of rope. It’s obscene, ridiculous, funny. I want to take it apart, unravel its conceptual threads, and prove that they do not weave into anything sensible—but clearly They didn’t. The conceptual threads are just a big pile, a mess. Part of me wants to be lyrical and describe the colors and fabrics, the smell, the history implicit in every strand, the stories of the hands that once pulled these ropes and yadda yadda yadda.

But I don’t think that’s the point. It’s actually just an old rope. This is great.