Maurizio cattelan came up in a comment on my post on the useless art object, and then I stumbled into a cursory interview with him at designboom. He served up this gem:

do you discuss your work with other artists? I TRY TO DISCUSS IT WITH EVERYONE: EVERY PIECE IS A TEST, AND IT NEEDS TO BE CONFRONTED, CRITICIZED, DESTROYED AND REBUILT. I TEND TO AVOID MY OWN OPINIONS, AND JUST TRUST THE OTHERS.

I'm quite smitten with system/rule-based art at the moment, so his pigeons with dropping at the Venice Bienniale 1997 is quite appealing to me. I'd mention that it is similar to a work in which an empty gallery is not cleaned for the duration of the exhibit, making the exhibit become the dirt and mess left behind by the gallery's visitors, but I have been sworn off mentioning that person.

And this squirrels' name is Bidibidobidiboo

There is actually some good juice in that squirrel article, coming with the blue collar attack on purposefully obscure art:

"Wyatt's trouble is the term 'representational.' It comes with some mighty negative implications in a contemporary-art market prone to rewarding perplexing fads, such as a Cattelan sculpture of a stuffed squirrel named Bidibidobidiboo committing suicide with a pistol at a kitchen table."

"Contemporary artists require the art bureaucracy of critics, galleries and museums to validate their existence and value because their work requires explanation,'' Fishko says. "So it behooves them to scorn representational artists whose work requires no explanation.''

"Back in Renaissance Florence, Italy, Wyatt says the contemporary-art market has erected an artificial wall against a growing number of young painters and sculptors who he says have been critically penalized and left struggling to gain notoriety for abandoning ephemera in favor of renewing the skillful techniques of the representational masters. Indeed, Ivan Massow, chairman of London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, has referred to much of today's high-priced exotica as ``pretentious, self- indulgent, craftless art.''

"The anthology also contained a Garnett Puett sculpture in reality made by 2,000 bees he released into a glass box fitted with a steel armature in the shape of a male head. After the swarm fashioned its honeycomb around the brace, Puett sucked the bees out with a vacuum cleaner."