Mark Spoon's crowd-created art work Weallarethisherenow4ever is an insight into the future of art. Is it a future we want to live in? Who knows. But it is coming, in fact it arrived yesterday, and I am strangely transfixed.
Like Antony Gormley's One & Other, this is a work that has been sourced from real and virtual communities, and that lives in blogs and websites worldwide as much as it does on the streets of London where, in fact, all you can see is a ... crowd. People coming towards you. People going away from you. A girl's smile. A grimacing old maniac on a bus. All are part of this first truly democratic public sculpture... or are they? The genius is that it's impossible to tell. That drooling bloke yelling outside Starbucks might be one of Spoon's people, acting according to a script compiled and recompiled daily by the 50 billion Spoonfaces who have already joined thescream.com. Or perhaps he's "just a nutter"?
Spoon began his career as a far more conventional artist. In fact, he studied drawing at the Royal Academy before painting Damien Hirst's canvases for 15 years. When Hirst recently decided to stop commissioning other people to do his paintings, and instead to become the world's richest amateur painter in a shed in his garden, Spoon found himself without work. Luckily he had also been a web designer for Hirst's online outlet Other Criteria so, inspired by Gormley's Fourth Plinth work, he started designing thescream.com as a way to enroll people as participants in his vast crowd.
Perhaps you're still bogged down in your own head, looking at works of art in galleries, cultivating those sensitivities of yours, thinking your private thoughts and "living" your "life". But the crowd is waiting for you. It embraces you. Don't you want to hug it?
