*

On a weightier note, allow me to return to art. Those two Russian con-men, Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, have come up with a new art scam. Congratulate them, dear Reader, for it is getting harder and harder to come up with a new art scam, though the fringes of our art market are never short of earnest efforts—viz the young man, John Fryer, who went on the Net to sell everything he owned (except himself, of course) and the University of Iowa which bought two of his discarded front false teeth for the University's collections. The curator at Iowa, one Howard Collinson, plans to build an exhibit around those teeth ($27 is cheap for a modern scam, but then we have to factor in the overheads, the exhibit, Mr. Collinson's no doubt handsome emoluments). Says our noble curator: "John is doing what great art does, which is to explore the world around us and help us to think differently about it." Uh-huh. I need Mr. Fryer's teeth to help me think "differently"? (By the way, I think Mr. Collinson means that the dentures might give us fresh thoughts, not that we'd think in a different way; but grammar's never been a strong point among contemporary curators.)

Messrs Komar and Melamid have got elephants painting—with a brush held in their trunk and different colored pots of paint before them. Our hero curator here is a certain Russel Storer of the Australian (Sydney) Museum of Contemporary Art. It is to Mr. Storer that we owe the ultimate definition of art for our day. Says he: "Everything shown in a museum is artistic. If an artist says what he does is art, it's art. If recognized talents like Komar and Melamid say [the elephant paintings] are art, they are."

I fart, therefore I am. My fart is art. Solipsism's come a long way, baby!