Can You ‘Ear Me Now?

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 24031 – 1330

Here’s the haps:

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open, especially if I read or see something I might want to blog about later. The problem is, I don’t always remember how I wound up looking the thing up to begin with (My settings are to reopen the last pages I was on, so I currently have 32 tabs open, chock full of ideas I want to blog about). It’s not in me to just close them and forget about them; I have to re-read the page before I can close it, and if it’s an idea I like, I will just leave it open. With this piece, I don’t remember why I was looking this up at all.

I think I was looking up the main topic of this post because I saw, in passing somewhere, that someone was offended. As Gomer Pyle would say, “Sur-prise, Sur-prise!” Nowadays, everybody’s offended by something and very easily too, it seems. What happened, in February of 2022 was that a museum or art gallery or some such in London had a display of Vincent Van Gogh artworks. So far, so good. But in their gift shop was a product called an “Earaser” which had the tagline, “Gogh and erase your mistakes.” It’s just an eraser (For my UK-English speakers, it’s a rubber, i.e., an object used to rub out or erase mistakes) shaped, as you might guess, like an ear.

The outcry was, of course, “How could they be so insensitive‽‽‽ Don’t they know that the poor man was suffering from mental illness and depression‽‽‽ Are they mocking the mentally ill‽‽‽” Now, I grew up in a home where my one parent was in and out of mental hospitals, and I have also told you that I have suffered mental illness and depression as well. I touched on it a bit in the post called A Dark Epiphany back in June 2020. Mental illness, depression, suicide, etc. are no laughing matters. At all.

I said all that to qualify my next statement. I think it’s a really funny product and very clever and is not about any of those dark things at all. But I can also see where, depending on your tastes and sense of humor, someone could just as easily say it’s tacky and rude. They are still manufactured and sold by a company called Fred, which I had never heard of before. If you go there, please be aware that some of the products do display vulgarities, but by and large, they have a really clever line of products, many of which would make great white elephant exchange gifts.

As I’ve stated often enough, I know and understand very little about art but yet some things are just bizarre to me. In 2015, an artist, working with some MIT scientists, developed this:

It’s a piece of art by Diemut Strebe called Sugababe. It is a living ear, grown from Vincent Van Gogh’s DNA found on a postage stamp he licked and from cells from his great-great-grand-nephew. The display has a microphone that you can speak into but I’m not sure why. Anyway, I’m sure Dr. Frankenstein would be very, very interested. I was interested (but not surprised) to learn that none of the Van Gogh descendants wants to have the thing.