The Toilet Roll Chicken (UG)
Created | Updated Mar 6, 2006
A working man meets an avant-garde artist on entering a lift.
Man (politely): Hullo.
Artist (reluctantly): Hello, ahem.
Man: Excuse me, I recognise you ... now what the bleating lamb is your name? Can't think of it...
Artist: Cytra Nime. I'm an artiste.
Man: Oh, yes! You're the daffy-twit who cobbles all that pretentious crap, aren't you?
Artist (shocked): I beg your pardon?
Man (laughing): No offence, but I read that one of your exhibits was mistaken for trash by a cleaner and thrown out! What was it? Oh yes: a chicken made out of used toilet rolls? If I was the Pope I'd have sainted that cleaner.
Artist (looking around for an escape route): I believe the term is 'beatified', and I refuse to be lectured by a man who wears a decaying string vest.
Man (pulls at his vest to draw attention to it): I'll have you know this vest was washed a few days ago.
Artist (hands on hips): How about what you keep inside it? Was that washed a few days ago?
Man: Lady, I may be less than pristine, but at least this is real sweat from an honest day's slog in my workshop. I'm not a con artist.
Artist: Neither am I!
Man: Oh yeah? Go on then, tell me what useful purpose your art serves.
Artist: All right. For what it's worth (she looks heavenward), God said to me one day, he said: 'Cytra, with communism defunct, capitalist society has gone coat-hanger mad...'
Man: God uses colourful language, but I wouldn't argue with him there.
Artist: 'The only problem is', God said, 'that capitalist society doesn't realise it's gone mad'. The rich elite probably do, but don't care because they're in charge of the asylum. We need to show the people what's going on and galvanise them into action! How do we do it?
Man (mind elsewhere): Don't ask me, I can't even get my wife to...
Artist (grabbing the man passionately by the shoulders): My plan was to get the rich to do it to themselves: get them to buy and display my absolute rubbish for chimp-shrieking amounts of money, thus making it obvious to Joe Public, who has to scrimp and save for a decade to even buy a home, that the rich have obscenely more money than even a demi-god would need in its lifetime. I thought this could cause a revolution.
Man: Bloody hell! Nice idea. You're a bit like that Spanish bloke, the car one: you know ... er ... Picasso! He painted lots of people in bits in a village...
Artist: Guernica!
Man: What? Yes ... er ... to point out the violence of the Nazis to the world, except that of course all the mundid ringoes didn't see it until much later, when the world had nearly blown up. So you're doing the same thing for the super-rich, eh?
Artist: Well, sort of. However, there is a problem with the theory...
Man: I'm an engineer, mate. There usually is! In my 'umble opinion (puts on Cockney accent) theeyories are for people what don't know what they're doing.
Artist: You may be right. Last week my agent told me that I have sold 100,000 prints of my toilet roll chicken to the general public! It seems they want to emulate the rich...