The AP is reporting on an artist who seems to have been sniffing paint fumes a bit too much. Mark McGowan is an "artist" who has a new exhibit called "Running Water" that consists solely of a running faucet in a small kitchen in a London art gallery. He is going to leave the water running for an entire year to - get this - protest the waste of water in London.
The exhibit will be both wasteful and pricey. Over the course of the year, he will waste an estimated 3.9 million gallons of water. Since the exhibit started three weeks ago, he has already wasted 193,000 gallons of water during the driest Summer in London since 1976.
I certainly sympathize with the guy's environmentalism, but he seems to have missed the point in his desire to be thought-provoking. To waste 3.9 million gallons of clean drinking water when millions of people on the Earth are dying for want of clean drinking water is unconscionable.
This isn't art. It's lack of creativity and laziness. "Art" would have been setting up the exhibit so that a small pump under the sink recirculated the water to the faucet so you would have the image of wastefulness for people to reflect on without actually being wasteful.
We can only hope that no donor steps up to fund this stupidity since it sounds like the exhibit will prematurely end as soon as the poorly-funded gallery (who is paying for the exhibit) gets its first water bill.
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