Water Art

Not a good time for water artists. In Devon:

A thirsty thief is being blamed for downing a bottle of water, valued at £42,500, at a literary festival.

The two-litre clear plastic bottle containing melted ice from the Antarctic was devised to highlight global warming by artist Wayne Hill.

But the warm weather is thought to have got the better of someone who snatched it at the Ways with Words festival at Dartington Hall in south Devon.

American-born Mr Hill said the bottle was clearly a work of art.

He said: “It looked like an ordinary bottle of water. But it was on a plinth, labelled, described and in the programme of the whole festival.”

The piece, entitled Weapon of Mass Destruction, vanished half way through the festival. Mr Hill fears the bottle was taken and then drunk.

“It was there and then it was gone,” he said.

Well, that’s life. The economics has me puzzled though:

Its value was worked out by the artist from the damage worldwide of the entire ice sheet melting – he estimates between £6 trillion and £9 trillion – and the relative amount of damage from two litres of water.

The value is in the ice; damage happens when it melts. So the real value is -£42,500. The thief saved him money…

Well, it makes as much sense as his calculation.

Meanwhile, in South London:

A water company has given notice to a work of art which has already shed enough water to sprinkle half the lawns in Surrey.

The artist disconsolately conceded yesterday that his installation, The Running Tap, has probably run its course after pouring an estimated 800,000 litres (1.4m pints) down the drain during one of the worst droughts in the south-east in decades.

“Well that’s it, isn’t it?” Mark McGowan said miserably after a formal notice from Thames Water that if he does not turn the tap off, it will cut off the water to the entire gallery. “One way or another, I reckon it will be gone by Thursday….

He turned on the cold water tap, running into a sink in the kitchen space of the small artist-run House gallery in Camberwell, south-east London, on June 28.

He intended to leave it running for a year – to highlight, he insists, the way people waste water….

McGowan – whose previous creations include walking backwards for 11 miles with a turkey on his head, to draw attention to the problem of obesity – has never earned more than £400 from his art.