The Supermercado Project

There's been plenty of whinging, including front page newspaper stories, over this in the last few days.

THE Australia Council has given a Melbourne jeweller almost $9000 to make jewellery to hide in rubbish bins and laneway grates as an artistic statement on consumerism.
Impressed by the concept, the council's visual arts and craft board gave Caz Guiney an $8750 grant to make her "precious graffiti".

Guiney yesterday "installed" a finely tooled 18-carat gold ring in a rubbish bin in Melbourne's City Square as part of her "cityring" project, which is designed to make people question attitudes towards jewellery. "Often people hoard jewellery away in a bank vault or a jewellery box," Guiney said. "I want people to question what is precious and why it is so."

She has hidden 14 gold, silver and diamond pieces in laneway grates, on busy footpaths, in scaffolding and other gritty city locations. "I want to rattle the expectation as to where you might find precious objects," she said. "I hope it will get people thinking outside the normal constructs of jewellery."

Conventional wisdom is that this is a waste of money, a leftie wankfest etc.. etc.. along the lines of giving money to that guy who sat in a cage drinking milk but I, generally skeptical to these sorts of things, can actually see some sort of sense amongst all the madness.

I'm not sure of what her motives really are (something to do with the destruction of capitalism and saving the Swedish Elk I'm sure) but to me there's definately a point to it. It's performance art on a grand scale. What is art supposed to do? Get people talking. And this has certainly done that, it was even featured amongst much snickering and "what is the world coming to?" outrage on A Current Affair last night. Mission accomplished. The artist has achieved her aims already, and good luck to her I say.

It's called interactive art. You can go to a gallery in Fitzroy and look at paintings that give you clues as to where in Melbourne's CBD you can find the remaining $600 pieces. Now tell me that's not more interesting than looking at sculpture or something? I'd much rather see $9000 of my tax money going to this than to funding some of these shithouse Australian movies that are coming out at the moment (Horseplay? Ned? Fuck off!).

She might also be making a point about how greedy people are. I await with bated breath the video footage of cheapskates going through garbage bins looking for the rest of the booty.