A pickle taken from a McDonald’s cheeseburger and flung onto the ceiling, is being offered at an Auckland, New Zealand, art gallery, for upwards of $6,000, according to a story in The Guardian.
Artist Matthew Griffin’s work of modern art entitled “Pickle” is on view now at Auckland’s Michael Lett Gallery. The price tag on the dill is $6,200.
Griffin’s Pickle is meant to stoke conversations about “the way value and meaning is generated between people,” Fine Arts Sydney director Ryan Moore told the Guardian.
“Generally speaking, artists aren’t the ones deciding whether something is art is not,” the director said. “Whether something is valuable and meaningful as artwork is the way that we, collectively, as a society, choose to use it or talk about it.”
According to the gallery, the person who buys Pickle will not actually get the pickle slice, but, instead, will be given instructions on how to “recreate the art in their own space.”
In other words, the buyer will receive instructions on flinging another pickle slice onto a ceiling.
The pickle is stuck to the ceiling by the sauce that is attached to it, Moore said.
“As much as this looks like a pickle attached to the ceiling, and there is no artifice there, that is exactly what it is, there is something in the encounter with that as a sculpture or a sculptural gesture,” Moore added.
Other pieces in the exhibit include a drawing of a woman eating a banana, a plant in a clay pot and a lamp.
The $6,200 price tag for Pickle does not include the $2.79 cheeseburger the pickle came from.
Click here to see Pickle.
