FedEx shipping damage creates fractured artworks

&quot;Rather than thinking in terms of the Duchampian readymade, which is most often understood as operating iconically...&quot;<p>I got a real kick out of this line. At first I thought it was pure nonsense. After a bit of searching I found out that Marcel Duchamp was an artist that made some art called &quot;readymades.&quot; Then I realized that what I thought was just pure nonsense was actually someone talking normally, but it was about a field totally alien to me.

The thing I love about modern art is that initial instinctive reaction of &quot;Anyone could do this!&quot;. I have absolutely zero training in art so this might be a infantile opinion, but I am delighted by the pieces that makes me realize &quot;Anyone could do this, but no-one did until now.&quot;<p>All that to say, I really like this series of works.

Interesting! It&#x27;s not really about the glass cube, but about the shipping process and what that shipping process does to the things it ships. It highlights the brutality and scale well. It&#x27;s almost like a QA relic put on display. I wonder if there would be other good examples.

This seems unlikely - you can register an exact dimension?<p>&gt; As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions. In other words, the size of an official FedEx box, not just its design, is proprietary; it is a volume of space which is a property exclusive to FedEx.

I&#x27;m going to be that guy. I can&#x27;t help myself. This is <i>fine</i> for making art, and this is a <i>really fun</i> project that I enjoyed a lot.<p>But... I&#x27;ve seen enough unboxings of damaged goods, and ropey packaging over the years that has similarly led to damage here in real life, that it seems worth saying even amongst an intelligent crowd: the thickness of a cardboard box is <i>not in any way</i> sufficient to protect <i>any</i> goods more valuable than a book&#x2F;DVD&#x2F;video game&#x2F;CD jewel case[0] during shipping, let alone fragile goods.<p>You need to make sure that you buy a box that&#x27;s big enough to hold whatever you&#x27;re sending, plus all the padding you&#x27;re going to pack all around it to prevent it from being damaged by knocks or being dropped.<p>This will add to the weight and size of your package, and therefore the cost of shipping, but it&#x27;s worth it to ensure your goods arrive undamaged at their destination.<p>&lt;&#x2F;thatguymode&gt;<p><i>[0] Even this one is debatable given how easy these are to crack and prone they are to the hinge tabs snapping off. The CD jewel case is a wildly successful design but not, I would argue, a great design - certainly not a great design for the particularly brittle plastic they&#x27;re made out of. Ironic considering the discs themselves are made out of polycarbonate, and are therefore fairly durable.</i>

Reminds me of the Japanese art Kintsugi&#x2F;kintsukuroi which is the name for repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold silver or platinum powder.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kintsugi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kintsugi</a>

As an artist, and one of the many who studied Duchamp in school, I love these. But I wonder if they aren’t potentially endangering the FedEx workers who transport them. Is there not some danger of getting a shard of glass sticking through the box?<p>The obvious Duchamp reference here by the way is not to his readymades but to his Large Glass:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smarthistory.org&#x2F;duchamp-largeglass&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;smarthistory.org&#x2F;duchamp-largeglass&#x2F;</a>

<i>&quot;As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions&quot;</i><p>Surely that&#x27;s not right? What value is brought by only allowing one entity to register a 10&quot;x2&quot;x8&quot; box, for example?

It seems fantastic, I love the idea and goes to show how out of touch something can become by involving multiple people&#x2F;workflow, etc.

Reminds me of this olifur eliasson piece:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;olafureliasson.net&#x2F;archive&#x2F;artwork&#x2F;WEK110935&#x2F;memories-from-the-critical-zone-germanypolandrussiachinajapan-no-1#slideshow" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;olafureliasson.net&#x2F;archive&#x2F;artwork&#x2F;WEK110935&#x2F;memorie...</a><p>&gt; Most of the artworks in Sometimes the river is the bridge were shipped by surface transport from Berlin to Tokyo to reduce the exhibition’s carbon footprint. Drawings were produced by a chance process that unfolded while the artworks were travelling by truck, train, and boat along their route. In each set-up, a ballpoint pen was held by a mechanical arm so that it moved over the surface of the paper in response to the movements of the crate, producing a visual record of the terrain over which the artworks passed.<p>Delightfully recursive in that the exhibition of the artwork creates the art being exhibited.. neither would exist without the other.

FedEx owns the box design and dimensions that these glass pieces explicitly imitate. FedEx also significantly contributes to the value of these pieces by applying unique and creative forms of rough handling during shipment.<p>Does FedEx own this art, and should the credited individual be paying them a share of the money earned from its display?

&gt; As for the corporate dimension, I was aware that standard FedEx boxes are SSCC coded (serial shipping container code), a code that is held by FedEx and excludes other shippers from registering a box with the same dimensions.<p>I wonder if this is true, because if so it would be a particularly ridiculous example of &quot;intellectual property&quot;.<p>Anecdotally I have read a few of these art PR-pieces where such details were made up.

It would be so cool if they did not just shipping to art galleries, but also mass produced it so you could get your own fedex shipping box art at home.

Every once in a while, I see art I really wish I had thought of...especially as a non-STEM major who has a high affinity for applied STEM stuff.

I wonder if the works fall under copyright laws, when the result does not depend on artist intervention.

Well this is hacker news and I’d consider this an art hack.

&gt; And each time the work is shipped — say from one gallery to another — it’s unwittingly altered further by a system created by a massive multinational corporation:<p>Methinks the writer of this article has a chip on their shoulder or someone hurt them.

Personally, I judge art purely on the final result by principle and refuse to consider the artist itself, his stated intent, or the process by which he made it, as well as the source material whereupon it might be based: — it must stand on it&#x27;s own merit.<p>In this particular case I find the cracks to not be terribly unæsthetic but not spectacular either, and consider it largely an inferior form of <i>Wabi-Sabi</i> design.<p>I do not like how much the art world is about the artist rather than the art itself, and how a story must accommodate it such as the novel production technique of shipping it as such.<p>It is essentially a world of hero worship where one&#x27;s name is more important than one&#x27;s productions.