I can actually elaborate on this, because last time I toured the catacombs we had a delightful guide who was a very enthusiastic PhD student and this was, apparently, partly what he was doing his dissertation on. (I talked to him for a while one-on-one; we bonded over the sweet hell that is graduate school.) Anyway, according to him, there was this weird artsy quasi-anarchist amateur-spelunking group that used to throw these very illegal parties down in the catacombs. This, of course, isn’t safe at all because (1) parts of the catacombs are not structurally sound and you risk suffocating or being crushed to death, and (2) they’re damn near impossible to navigate if you don’t know what you’re doing. As in multiple people have literally died of thirst before finding their way out–one of whom finally collapsed a bare twenty meters from the exit, which he couldn’t see because it’s so infernally dark. How’s that for shitty, shitty irony?
Anyway, after stumbling across little bits of evidence that people were exploring the out-of-bounds areas of the catacombs and leaving like, a few cigarette butts and empty bottles behind, the Paris police issued a stern cease-and-desist basically saying, “STOP DOING THAT YOU COULD ALL DIE” and this one group basically said, “Bitch make us” and proceeded to get more and more ostentatious with their bizarre subterranean Magic-Theatre soirees, just to prove that they knew the catacombs better than anybody else and there was pretty much nothing the authorities could do to stop them. The electricity thing in itself isn’t really that mysterious because anywhere you could fit a makeshift movie theatre you could also bring the generators to run it (so long as they’re not gas-powered, because underground that would probably mean carbon monoxide poisoning…not that safety was the first priority here). It would be a hassle, but doable. That’s not the good part. The good part is that not only did they illegally set up an entire movie theatre in the tunnels under the city of Paris, but they left it there just to taunt the authorities. Eventually this kind of stuff stopped. Nobody really knows why except the pranksters themselves, I suppose, but literally only in Paris do you get a troupe of drama queens as epic as they are unapologetically petty.
Over a year ago, just as we were on the verge of removing a nonsensical and poorly performing card I’d written for Cards Against Humanity back before we knew how to write well, “Swooping” took on a new significance thanks to Urban Dictionary. I found the card safeguarded by a self-referential paradox further guaranteed by its cultural dissemination: the more people were confused by “Swooping,” the more people looked it up on Urban Dictionary and upvoted it in an effort to make sense of the card.
In the spirit of giving this holiday season, please help me keep this mediocre card in the game by continuing to upvote it. Thank you for your time, and long live the Paradox.
By copyrighting his property as an artwork, he has prevented oil companies from drilling on it.
Peter Von Tiesenhausen has developed artworks all over his property in northern Alberta. There’s a boat woven from sticks that is gradually being reclaimed by the land; there is a fence that he adds to each year of his life, and there are many “watching” trees, with eyes scored into their bark.
Oil interests pester him continually about drilling on his land. His repeated rebuffing of their advances lead them to move toward arbitration. They made it very clear that he only owned the top 6 inches of soil, and they had rights to anything underneath. He then, off the top of his head, threatened them that he would sue damages if they disturbed his 6 inches, for the entire property is an artwork. Any disturbance would compromise the work, and he would sue.
Immediately after that meeting, he called a lawyer (who is also an art collector) and asked if his intuitive threat would actually hold legally. The lawyer visited, saw the scope of the work on the property, and wrote a document protecting the artwork.
The oil companies have kept their distance ever since.
This is but one example of Peter’s ability to negotiate quickly on his feet, and to find solutions that defy expectations.
Titus Kaphar was born in 1976 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He currently lives and works between New York and Connecticut, USA. His artworks interact with the history of art by appropriating its styles and mediums. Kaphar cuts, bends, sculpts and mixes the work of Classic and Renaissance painters, creating formal games and new tales between fiction and quotation.
