I mean, aside from getting your face in NYT, I guess: The Munchies

This month, the Chelsea gallery LMAKprojects is offering a strangely literal twist on this idea: for the inaugural exhibition of its satellite location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the artist Emily Katrencik is eating the wall that separates the gallery’s exhibition space from the bedroom of its director, Louky Keijsers.

Five days a week, Ms. Katrencik consumes a section of wall 1.956 inches square and three sheets of drywall thick, for a total of about 8.5 cubic inches of drywall; she rests on Sundays and Mondays. Each meal takes about half an hour. She began on Jan. 1, to ensure that there would be a sizable hole before the opening on Jan. 28, and will keep it up until the exhibition closes on Feb. 27, at which time she calculates the hole will be large enough to stick your head through. She usually gnaws directly on the wall, working away at a sizable, eye-level hole, and avoids eating when the public is present. Video of her ingestion is included in the exhibition; she also removes some of the plaster and bakes it into loaves of bread, which are available for gallery visitors to sample. “Part of it is that I’m really broke,” she said, “so this is a way to get the gallery to cover my food costs.”

[…]

So how is this diet affecting her health? “I try not to think about it,” she said. “Instead, I look at the things in the wall that are good for me, like calcium and iron.” One of the main components of drywall is calcium sulfite, she noted, a mineral that can be found in tofu, canned potatoes and some baked goods. She said that she had not had any digestive problems, but was careful to eat a lot of vegetables to balance the binding effect of the plaster. And the taste? “This drywall tastes pretty chalky,” she said. “I prefer cast concrete because it has a more metallic flavor. You can taste the iron.”

Granted, I am no doubt an obtuse uncultured boob (hey, it is Super Bowl Sunday), but giveth me a break. Art? I think not.

This kind of stuff is no different than Fear Factor, The Bachelorette or any other humiliation-based reality show (which is largely a redundancy, I will allow) save the fact that (for reasons I cannot comprehend) eating drywall in a museum (and not even live!) is somehow glazed with a patina of Deep Thought and Artitistic Intent.

But let’s face facts: whether one is pretending to fall in love with a stranger on the The Bachelorette, eating spiders on Fear Factor or gnawing dywall in a museum, you are after the same thing: attention and hopefully a little coin.

h/t: Althouse.