People who know me well know that I like to play pranks. The larger the audience, the better. I especially love conning a whole group of people, which is called culture jamming. Other pranksters like the Yes Men or Joey Scaggs do it to further a cause such as pointing out corporate hypocrisy or media culpability. I just like fucking with people.
I just turned 70, and it’s important to me to finally reveal my greatest prank before I die. I can now tell the world that I am the Philadelphia Wireman.
First some background. The artistic world is always looking for the newest thing. Unsatisfied with people that study art in universities, the artistic world turned to outsider art, essentially untrained artists that made art for the sheer joy of doing it. Outsider art made by simple folk generated the most interest, leading to frenzied interest in the work of the deaf and probably autistic James Charles Castle and the 10,000+ page novel and drawings by janitor Henry Darger.
The Philadelphia Wireman story says that an art student found over 1000 sculptures made of wire and garbage in a box next to a dumpster outside of a Philadelphia transient home in 1982. The artist is believed to have died, and the sculptures, assumed to be his life’s work, were discarded by staff. They are now featured prominently in some of the finest galleries in the world.
The truth is my late wife and I spent a year haphazardly putting together these sculptures, finishing several each day, and the art student was a friend of our son who was in on it. There was no transient. The prank was easy and fun. And in the end, this prank was more artistic than anything that the Philadelphia Wireman created.
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