Virtual Vandal

I'm giving up my weekend for the sake of a rabbit. These animal sculptures spend the last few days of their nativity pretending to be finished, but when you look again there is always something else to be done. There comes a point when you have to say, 'enough is enough', then turn your back on them.

I spent three years helping someone carve three classical figures in stone for Sebastian Ferranti. Same situation. Two of those years were spent in trying to get them finished. It is ironic that we were removing three wheelbarrows of stone per day in the first few days, then the less stone removed, the longer it took. When it came time to remove microns with sandpaper, it took an age.

Finally it came time to put them high up on the front pediment of his house in Cheshire (a copy of the Villa Rotunda) then shortly afterwards he went bankrupt. The administrators contacted the sculptor and asked him how much the statues were worth for their assessments. When they were told that the only way to get them back down to the ground would be to destroy them, they forgot the idea.

An American artist (I think Jeff Koons) has recently created a virtual reality sculpture in a real park, in the same way that people now hunt for Pokemon using their mobile phones.

The idea is that you link the 3D image of the sculpture to GPS so that when you go to the real location and turn your camera phone on in a certain mode, there is the sculpture, sitting on the grass in front of you. You can walk around it to see all sides, but it is not really there.

Another sculptor heard about it, and was so offended that Koons was arrogant enough to use a public place without asking anyone's permission that he planned a punishment.

He went to the virtual reality sculpture online by hacking his way into it, then he covered it in virtual graffiti, so if you go to the park looking for that sculpture now, you will find it spattered in spray paint.

What a brilliant idea.