Taking Credit for Someone Else's Art

I want to do an art installation, and you can help.
You know, a collection of unconnected stuff, artfully strewn across a designated ‘space’, signifying different things to different people, depending on the time of day, the amount of sunlight, socio-economic assumptions and the like.
Art is more and more not what anyone makes, but what we are subjected to.
Know what I mean?

The cool thing, or at least one of the cool things about installations, is that we all bring something to them: they require our participation.
That wasn’t always the case.
DaVinci didn’t need a long queue outside of the palace to verify the obvious: that guy could paint!
But modern art installations require participation: which in a way, is to say that all of life, seen from a particular perspective, is art.
Where am I going with this?
Nowhere.
I’m just sitting at home, opening my mail, and from my perspective CapitalOne – the big credit card company, is making an artistic statement that deserves a greater audience.
Actually, you probably couldn’t get a bigger audience than CapitalOne already has, but what they need is for someone, like me, to comment on the artistic aspect of their endeavor.
Or perhaps what they need is someone like me to gather others like me, together, to share the experience that each of us, individually, is experiencing courtesy of CapitalOne.
Did you ever see those sculptures – mostly busts, which are made out of hundreds of separate, flat slices of wood?
Are you familiar with that modern artist who uses a thousand tiny little painted pictures to assemble one portrait?
Have you received 173 separate mailings from CapitalOne –each one completely different from the other, yet each one making the same silly appeal to accept another credit card?
I have before me as I write, my favorite: what appears to be a brown paper lunch bag – with the words “Time Sensitive Documents Enclosed” written boldly across the front. In fact I have four of these: one addressed to me, one to my wife, one to my college age son, and one to Art Gecko, a pet that is well on his way to fertilizing the back yard grass.
How “Time Sensitive” can the message be, that comes every day, every week, every month?
I am not sure why they resorted to the brown paper bag approach. Maybe they thought it would appeal to my blue-collar sensibilities. But then why did they send me the same offer, enclosed in a shiny, shimmering futuristic-looking envelope, a few weeks ago? And why the 170 other variations on the same theme?
I can’t be the only one that is receiving this kind of attention – but that in itself seems absurd.
Can CapitalOne really afford to send every man, woman and child in America a new credit card offer every week?
And if they can afford to do that, why can they afford to do that?
Or maybe it’s my questionable credit-worthiness that attracts them: though I don’t look like a great credit risk, I may look like a sure-fire bet to pay loads of late fees.
Maybe it really is a joke.
Perhaps a long-forgotten college room mate, who made a billion dollars selling imitation Viagra tablets using Spam email messages, is now spending some of his ill-gotten gains torturing me with these endless mailings.

But back to the arts.
For the next year I want you to take every one of the unsolicited credit card offers you receive –not just CapitalOne, and put them in a big trash bag.
Then, next year on March 16, bring them to a local museum where someone with experience in installations can note the number and variety of your contribution, then arrange them in an effective way.
I envision the exhibition room shaped like a giant glass mailbox.
On the outside of the museum building there’ll be a giant slot where anyone could drive up, drop their letters in, and watch them fall on to the heads of those attending the exhibition, then scatter all over the exhibition floor.
We’ll have sponsors for our exhibition too: corporations love to support the arts.
We’ll have a special reception and fundraiser to benefit a worthy charity, at which executives from the corporate sponsors, selected guests, and a representative sample of poor credit risks will be able to argue about the artistic potential of direct mail.
Any funds leftover after the reception, the show, and the clean-up, will go to paying my existing credit card bills.
What’s in your wallet?
Mine’s overflowing with art!