The Golden Age of Mediocrity

On the other hand, maybe mediocrity is the new genius. In 2002, for example, New York's New Museum of Contemporary Art displayed "Cloaca," a room-size mechanical installation by Belgian sculptor Wim Delvoye that was designed to emulate the human digestive system. Twice each day, at one end of the artwork, a plate of food from one of several tony Manhattan restaurants was fed into a blender and pumped through a complex tangle of pipes and vats, where it was subjected to computer-controlled doses of enzymes, acids and bacteria. A day or so later, the opposite end of the sculpture squeezed out a soft brown substance that bore a striking resemblance to human feces.

"I chose [excrement] because it is not only useless, it's also cosmopolitan, so universal," the artist told an interviewer from Wired magazine. "You could go anywhere, and it speaks to everyone." Critics hailed the work, waxing profound about "the iconography of the scatological" and the cleverness of Delvoye's symbolic statement about the insignificance of postmodern culture.

Art aficionados purchased samples of "Cloaca's" output from Delvoye's website for $1,500 per ersatz stool. In doing so, those aesthetes chose to ignore the fact that the art-is-crap motif is a bit derivative. Four decades ago, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni peddled 30-gram cans of his excrement to collectors for a price equivalent to its weight in gold. A British museum recently bought a surviving example for $35,000. Hmmm. Here's an idea--and it's guaranteed to be pure genius. Get me those research monkeys. They may not be too adept at replicating the Bard, but they're pretty good at producing something else.