Is there a point in even making a comment? That was my first thought as I stood there, staring at a pile of ropes in a glossy Mayfair gallery. I wasn’t expecting revelation, shock, or even irritation. I just wanted to see if the exhibition felt any different in person than it had in every single photograph endlessly circulating online. It didn’t.
By the time I arrived, I’d already seen the show on Instagram at least seven times and read a few reviews. Well, they weren’t really reviews. They were standard cultural fillers covering whatever happened to be opening that week, or whatever show the gallery had paid to have “covered.” As if writing headlines like “A British artist selling old ropes for a million. Outrage ready-made. Relevance conjured from the absurdity of the price tag.” somehow counted as meaningful commentary.
Only Eddy Frankel, whose name floats around every gallery and membership arts club, offered something that seemed to be an opinion. He simply did what any critic could reasonably do when faced with this exhibition: say that it’s a pile of ropes, that it’s a joke, that it was relevant once but isn’t anymore. And to be fair, the most important ready-mades* in art history were once genuinely disruptive. They arrived at the right moment, in the right political weather, to question taste, value, labour, authorship, class, all of it. They were provocative because they needed to be.
But somewhere along the way, the copy of the copy of the copy drifted into something else. The commentary shifted from challenging social structures to gently mocking the art world’s own financial absurdities. Many of them were very relevant, but they don’t shock anymore. They expose, quite plainly, how the problem of having too much money can inflate the price of almost anything. Meaningless objects are placed in pristine galleries and given both cultural and financial value because someone (Stephen Friedman, in that case) has the authority to say so.
*Ready-mades are artworks made from ordinary, pre-existing objects that the artist did not craft themselves. The artist takes something from everyday life, puts it in a museum or a gallery and declares it a work of art.
These artworks practically tell the buyer, “You’re purchasing this because you can, because the gallery told you it matters, because excess creates its own logic.” And the remarkable thing is that people still buy it, even though they exactly know the work is commenting directly on their act of buying.
But did we really need another artwork pointing that out? After Cattelan’s flashy entrance with the Comedian in 2019, anything that tries to make the same point starts to feel like the person who explains a joke long after everyone has already laughed. The work plays with the gallery system, pokes at the absurdity of value-making, and invites the audience to recognise the joke. The journalists, meanwhile, only reported the spectacle because “Is there a point in even making a comment?”
The articles followed the same script: “This is what the artist claimed. This is what the press release insisted. This is what the gallerist affirmed.”
And then, almost out of nowhere, came the obligatory nod to recycling, slipped in with the hope that this moral angle might add a hint of depth without disrupting the commercial gloss of the gallery. The irony, of course, no one seemed bothered by the fact that vans and lorries had hauled these heavy, waterlogged seaside ropes all the way to London, belching out enough fumes to flatten any supposed moral high ground about reusing materials.
But what kept me up for the last few nights was my mind circling around the logistics of this work. The multi-millionaire collector will have some luxurious storage bunker to hide the ropes in for the next hundred years, but where did David keep them before they became “art”? Under his bed? On the radiator? Buried in the garden? In the glove compartment, as an emergency for whatever disasters only he can imagine?
I cannot shake the feeling that they come from a personal obsession. People collect stamps or coins. David collects ropes. They feel too lovingly accumulated to be anything else. And there’s something genuinely charming about that. Yet I also like to imagine that this devotion eventually tipped into domestic crisis, the kind where someone finally stands in the doorway and says, “David. Enough is enough. The ropes have to go.” The exhibition becoming, almost accidentally, the cheapest storage solution available.
And then I imagine the other David, the one at the private view, holding champagne among wealthy collectors and random art students, performing interest on cue while quietly checking the time of the last train home. Not worrying whether people found the work profound or amusing. Not worrying whether anyone planned to buy it. A little detached from the very thing he once couldn’t stop collecting, now that the ropes have been lifted out of their natural environment in the sock drawer and forced into a gallery. But what if the work doesn’t sell? Because if they return home, they will still be worth a million on paper. What do you do with ten tonnes of ropes that are now as expensive as your house?
So. Did I like the show? I felt indifferent, and that’s probably the worst thing that could have happened. Unfortunately, even with my wild imagination sprinting to make it interesting, the show added nothing to my life. Not even irritation. And I always hope that the art I travel forty minutes on the tube and ten minutes in the rain for will trigger something in me. This time it didn’t. I left exactly as I arrived: damp, tired, and still thinking about where he kept the ropes.
However. Now that I think about it… Maybe that was my emotional response after all.