art prank / replacing old sockets with new ones

Roy R. Behrens, Deplorable Strikes ©2004

Jeffrey Vallance, quoted in Pranks, an edition of Re/Search (February 1988), p. 115—

One day I walked around the Museum looking at paintings and noticed that underneath them were all these wall sockets. So I bought a number of wall sockets and painted stupid little scientific scenes on them, like microscopes and dinosaurs and cows and slabs of butter. I showed up at the Museum in a janitor's outfit, with a name tag and a toolbox, and started replacing the old wall sockets with my new ones. I had friends in the hallway who would whistle every time a guard came near—then I'd go somewhere else. Sometimes I had to move furniture out of the way, and if ladies would be sitting down I'd have to say, "Can you please move? I have to fix this wall socket." Nobody caught me. I sent out a bunch of invitations, just like a real show, and people came down. I made up some nicely illustrated programs, and sent one to the Museum to tell them about my project. I thought I'd get some sort of reaction...but I never heard from them...they hushed the whole thing up, and the wall sockets remained there for about two years.

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have shriveled testicle from mumps / can't marry

Roy R. Behrens, Levitation © 2004

Danny Ballow, quoted in Elizabeth Stone, Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us (New York: Times Books 1988) p. 208—

It began with him [my father] telling me about how he had the mumps, and then leaps forward to my parents' courtship by mail when he was in America and she was still in London. He told me that during the course of the correspondence, he wrote, "I think I have to tell you something. I have a shriveled left testicle, and I can't marry you because I'm not able to have children."

He sealed the letter and mailed it, and then he thought, "Oh no, what did I do?" He went to the mailbox but the postman had already come and taken the letter. So he went down to the central mail office in Brooklyn...and they said, "Well it's somewhere in all these sacks." My father said, "I've got to get it." And he went through the sacks. I have this image of my father going through millions of letters. And he found the letter! He tore it up, and he didn't send it.

William Blake, neuroscience, esthetics & sports

Above William Blake Poster (2011) © Roy R. Behrens.

•••

Roy R. Behrens, Art, Design, and Brain Research: Non-Scientific Thoughts about Neuroesthetics in Gestalt Theory, Vol 35 No 2 (2013), pp 169-182—

Today, when I think about defining art (in truth, it’s something I usually try to avoid), I am reminded of an old routine that was part of a Monty Python comedy in 1972. It was a parody of an athletic competition, and one segment featured a sports-running contest in which the participants were "people with no sense of direction." In that sketch, the athletes were shown in their starting positions, awaiting the sound of the pistol. When the gun sounded, they all ran off—not down the track as expected, but instead in a wacky confusion of speeds, directions and running styles.…

I find it ironic that artists today are distressed by the imbalance of public devotion to art and athletics, and the seemingly limitless funding that goes to competitive sports in our society. It is typical for an artist to ask: Why isn't such funding given to the arts instead? Why is there so little coverage of art in the news when such excessive attention is given to sports? Why does art have such low priority in public education? In short: Why don't people take art seriously? I suspect this is largely explainable by the fact that in art, as widely practiced now, just as in the Monty Python sketch, there is no credible "contest" to watch.

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