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Money for old rope? Shrigley wants £1m
The Guardian
|November 14, 2025
How long is a piece of string? David Shrigley can't answer that, but he can tell you how much it weighs.
His latest installation, titled Exhibition of Old Rope, is quite literally an exhibition of 10 tonnes of old rope, accumulated by him over months, and left in towering mounds in this swanky gallery in London's Mayfair.
Most of it is marine rope, destined for landfill. It's hard to recycle this stuff, it seems, and there's an endless supply of it dumped around the world. So Shrigley scooped up as much of it as he could find, piled it up and put a massive price tag on it.
The work can be yours for £1m.
And that's the point of the whole show: this is literally money for old rope. It's not that deep - it's just an idea taken to its logical conclusion, a pun taken too literally.
Shrigley made his name with deadpan visual one-liners: simple paintings with simple phrases across them, a bunch of selfdeprecating but often funny non sequiturs.
Cette histoire est tirée de l'édition November 14, 2025 de The Guardian.
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