Glob-a-log

Art sells. Arts sells big time. Any van Gogh or Rembrandt or Vermeer going under the hammer, will hammer the message home: You wanna get rich, get your hands on some big (dead) name merchandise and flog it. Then you really will be talking about painting by numbers – very big numbers.

Only problem is: there aren’t that many van Goghs, Rembrandts or Vermeers to be found outside museums and pretty well-protected, private collections. And they’re damn hard to fake.

Enter Jackson Pollock. Pollock has three things going for him:

1) He made a lot of paintings
2) He’s dead
3) He’s incredibly easy to imitate.

We are truly talking easy money here.

And here’s how you do it – in six simple steps:

1) Remember the movie Reservoir Dogs? Those six gangsters with the colour code names? That’s where we start. Go to some specialist painter’s place and buy six largish tubes of paints.

2) Rent some old, empty barn. Any barn will do, as long as there are no holes in it.

3) Buy and lay down as many canvases as will fit on the floor of the barn.

4) Go and buy six parrots.

You really need parrots. Parrots are the best. Ever heard of ‘pica’? No? Okay, read this first then:

The word pica comes from the Latin word for magpie, a bird known for its large and indiscriminate appetite.

Many young children put nonfood items in their mouths at one time or another. They’re naturally curious about their environment, and they may, for instance, eat some dirt out of the sandbox. Kids with pica, however, go beyond this innocent exploration of their surroundings. As many as 25% to 30% of kids (and 20% of those seen in mental health clinics) have an eating disorder called pica, which is characterized by persistent and compulsive cravings (lasting 1 month or longer) to eat nonfood items.

Parrots are the world’s most astonishing pica birds: they truly will eat any damn thing they see. The mystery of the lost island of Atlantis ? A no-brainer really: parrots ate it.

5) Take the parrots to the barn and hold the tubes of paint in front of their beaks. (Mind your fingers now!)

6) Let the birds loose inside the barn (and run like Hell.)

Parrots are quite amazing birds but they can malfunction rather easily:

Not all foods are good parrot foods. It has often been said that parrots can eat just about anything that we humans can eat, this is just not the truth. It would be a wise decision, to forget that what tastes good to you must also taste good for your parrot.

Many foods are just unable to be digested well by the parrot and may lead to an upset gastrointestinal tract.

A parrot with diarrhoea does not paint a pretty picture – but then, we’re not after a pretty picture. We want Pollocks.

So, about five minutes after the parrots have swallowed the paint they will get hit with the shits. And a paint-shitting parrot is a nervous parrot, which will then do what all birds do when they get nervous: take to the air and fly around in a dither. A paint-spraying dither, in this case.

It will probably take about fifteen more minutes for all the paint to run through all the parrots – and for your Pollocks to be finished.

See, told you it was dead-easy.

Now, go and make some Jacksons – and don’t forget to send me my 15% cut, in small notes. You do not want to find out about my six easy steps’ plan to debt-collecting (Which do involve, amongst other things, orangutans, six pair of head-phones, duct tape and the CD, ‘The Best of ABBA’.)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 21:25 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.