5 Artists Who REALLY Take Pride In Trolling Their Targets
by Pauli Poisuo
Generally speaking, a career in the arts pays very little, but artists do it anyway because they’re hardcore and badass like that. And that’s why we have to give an extra tip of the hat to those creative types who use their skill and vision just to mess with people, and do so in hilarious but (mostly) harmless ways.
The Perpetually Sinking Boat
Throughout history, humankind has had a strong desire to build boats, which is why we now have them in the sporting enthusiast, exploratory, and armed-with-world-ending-nuclear-weapons varieties. And one time a man by the name of Julien Berthier actually fulfilled his own personal boat-building fantasy, to the mild amusement yet maximum annoyance of pretty much everyone else.
See, there’s two things you should know about ol’ Julien. One, he’s a French artist who’s very, very good at building stuff. Two, it sure looks like he straight up enjoys the many mini heart attacks he’s presumably given to the people who witness the boat that’s always sinking.
Berthier’s creation is a cool and rather expensive-looking yacht which he ruthlessly sawed in half, sealed with fiberglass, and set up with a keel and two electric motors. This left him with the least impressive, yet most alarming supervillain vehicle in the world: a craft that can sail the seas at an odd angle that looks like it’s two seconds from visiting Davy Jones’ Locker.
Julien berthier
And one second away from a rad, action movie-style dive from the top just before it goes under.
The artist set out to actively bring the boat to the people, keeping it in various harbors around the world, and sailing it about just to see how everyone reacts. “People never really know what to think when they see it for the first time,” Berthier explains. “I like taking the boat out because it's important to me that the public gets to see my work out there in everyday life before it ends up in museums and galleries.”
But "seeing his work" often means "freaked-out reactions," like when cops and coast guards sail out to rescue him because they think he's sinking. Accordingly, he’s been known to inform the local authorities whenever he plans to give the sinky-boaty an outing, but even that has had mixed results. For instance, when he took the yacht to Lake Constance in Germany, he took great pains to warn all the harbormasters, firemen, cops, and whatnots. Despite this, he was soon the target of a 20-person rescue operation when someone who wasn’t in the art boat information loop spotted the S.S. Sinktastic and called for help.
The Toilet They Named "America"
When an artist decides to name their artwork after a country, said country is generally wise to expect shenanigans. When the nation in question is the U.S., probably doubly or triply so. Of course, there’s only so much insult a single artwork can pack. A version of “American Gothic” where they have dollar signs for eyes? Sure, whatever. Some sort of Banksy-style pop culture criticism piece where a refugee is wearing one of those Mickey Mouse ears hats? Ouch, but still, nothing the world hasn’t seen before. A fully functional, solid gold toilet called "America?" That's ... OK, that's pretty good.
And this golden toilet actually exists, courtesy of Italian artist/troll Maurizio Cattelan. What’s more, it doesn’t just sit around in a museum, classily thumbing its nose at every passing U.S. citizen. Well, technically it does, but the Guggenheim Museum in New York has still managed to hilariously deploy it against the powers that be. In early 2018, the White House wanted to borrow a Van Gogh painting from the Guggenheim. The museum’s chief curator vetoed the idea, but because she wasn’t an unreasonable person, she told them that she had some other (aptly-titled!) art she would be happy to loan them.
William Edwards / AFP / Observer
Sorry, no points for guessing which artwork she had in mind.
One “So, anyway, want to have our golden toilet for awhile?” and an inevitable doxxing campaign later, "America" continues to lurk in the Guggenheim where it’s installed in a random bathroom for viewers to admire and, uh, interact with.
The Roof Artists
Quick: Where, in a building, is art? You said “walls,” didn’t you? Or "bathroom" because of the last entry? Well, both are right, but so is the floor or on pedestals or sometimes even the roof. And that last one is especially cool (terrifying?) when that artist is Marlin Peterson.
In 2012, Peterson received a grant from the Artist Trust of Washington, and ended up using it on two massive, 60-foot daddy long-legs that he painted on a roof in Seattle. In glorious 3D, carefully placed so they were visible from the nearby Space Needle. If you think this was just an unfortunate coincidence, think again. Not only was the placement of the uncomfortably realistic, giant arachnids the result of careful planning, Peterson was outright looking forward to freaking folks out with them. “The only thing I can really hope to shoot for is maybe some tears from a kid or something,” he said. “Then I’ll know I did my job.”
Jake Ellison / KPLU
Somehow, Peterson’s child-traumatizing works aren’t even the most disturbing roof art in existence. That honor goes to Mark Gubin’s internet-famous welcome sign. In 1978, Gubin decided to paint “WELCOME TO CLEVELAND” on his roof in large letters to welcome the planes landing at a nearby airport. Which seems like a perfectly nice message, except for one thing: Gubin lived in Milwaukee.
The text has been there for decades, so imagine how many years it has shaved off the combined lives of the busy air travellers catching a glimpse of the sign and freaking the hell out. It resurfaces on the internet every now and again, and while few can deny its considerable merits in sheer trolling, in a roundabout way it ended up trolling its creator right back. See, Gubin has a career as an actual, professional artist, and this is the only thing most people will ever remember him for. This man’s Sistine Chapel’s ceiling is a goofy joke he made up on the fly over 40 years ago, and as of 2015 he was still getting invited on morning news shows to tell the story for the umpteenth time.
The Graffiti Artist Who Turns Everyone Into 50 Cent
In the spring of 2020, the world had many things to think about. However, noted rapper 50 Cent had a particularly baffling extra piece in his official 2020 bewilderment puzzle. In Melbourne, Australia, a graffiti artist who goes by "Lushsux" had inexplicably started using Fiddy as a muse for his art. Like, a whole bunch of his art.
@lushsux
Lushsux created large murals that featured Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Donald Trump, Mike Tyson and Tekashi 6ix9ine, all equipped with the majestic face of 50 Cent instead of their own respective mugs. The rapper reacted to the situation by running through the entire gamut of human emotion, from bemusement to bafflement, from frustration to anger. He took to posting selected Lushsux works on Instagram, peppered with commentary that simultaneously praised the artist’s talent and questioned his sanity. It was one of those weird but harmless situations that seems crazy but it involves a celebrity and that world is bonkers anyway.
So it would be tempting to leave the story there and imagining that Lushsux gets to spend the rest of his days successfully executing his darkly hilarious plan to forever befuddle a famous dude. Unfortunately, things came to a grinding halt in May when the street artist said he was jumped by a group of men who beat him so badly that he ended up in the hospital. And just the day before, 50 Cent had tweeted: “This guy need a ass whoopin bad, he still doing this s---.”
Both Fiddy and Lushsux were quick to point out that the rapper wasn’t actively behind the incident, and it appears that their “feud” is now more or less over. Then again, Lushsux’s Instagram indicates he’s still working his 50 Cent-themed magic along with a number of other HAHAHA THERE'S A "GUY FITTY" AND IT'S AMAZING:
@lushsux
The Artist Who Made Google Think She’s A Turner Prize Winner
The Turner Prize is one of the biggest prizes in art, provided you’re either born British or at least plying your trade in the U.K. As such, it’s not an easy feat to win one. Making people think that you’ve won one when you really haven't -- that’s an entirely new level of impressive. Well, assuming the people you’re trying to convince actually know what that is or at least how to google things.
Artist Gretchen Andrew is an American working in Los Angeles. Yet, for a short while in 2019, the internet was happy to tell you that she was a Turner Prize winner. It didn't do that because she had done so, and it didn't do that because she was going around lying about it. Not in the traditional sense anyway. She just tricked Google’s sophisticated algorithms to associate her own name and art with the term “turner prize” until the search giant said, “Yeah, that checks out,” and started pushing her work to the top of the results whenever someone googled the prestigious prize.
As you can probably guess, this was not a rookie operation. Andrew knew her stuff, and she herself used to work for Google. Even so, this “conceptual trolling” project took an absurd amount of work. She spent hours and hours spamming Amazon, Facebook and Twitter with Turner-themed content. She wrote WikiHow articles. She answered “every question” about how to win the Turner Prize on Quora. She created a website named Not Not the Turner Prize, which liberally discussed Turner Prize winners, and featured a series of artworks depicting people holding spatulas, or “turners.” Oh, and all along, she made sure that she wouldn’t be fooling a single human being -- only Google. The Not Not the Turner Prize website fully admitted what her game was to anyone who bothered clicking.
Pixabay
Which likely humored all of those people unless some of them were actual award winners trying to google themselves.
This, of course, was our rogue artist’s intention all along, as well as her preferred canvas. “I take my paintings and I program them online in a way where they come up in unexpected search results, where I’m targeting the way that humans can understand but the way that computers fail,” Andrew explained. She’s not kidding around, either, as she also pulled the same trick using esteemed art institutions Frieze LA and Whitney Biennial as search phrases.
Even today, the Google image search “Turner Prize winners” might give you a few of her spatula-wielding paintings, and it’s kind of comforting to know that the artist is still out there, using her considerable trolling toolkit to hijack some of the glory away from prestigious institutions. And now you know that if one day you happen to be googling the Nobel Prize and the first search result is a picture of a woman with a grin on her face and holding something that is decidedly “no bell,” you know what’s up.
