Sagmeister is a bit of a rock star in design. His project “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better” is of course mad and stunning. 250.000 EuroCents, eight days and more than 100 volunteers resulted in this crazy, beautiful sentence I can relate to.

They left the work unguarded. And here is the hilarious bit:

Less than 20 hours after the grand opening, a local resident noticed a person bagging the coins and taking them away. Protective of the design piece they had watched being created, they called the police. After stopping the ‘criminal’ the police–in an effort to ‘preserve the artwork’–swept up every remaining cent and carted them away.

If you make something like that, you know it will get stolen, and that is part and parcel. It is not the entire point, but it is part of a process of the transient. And what is more transient than money..? I doubt if the police asked the philosophical question; “does the bag of coins in some way contains an essence of the art and work?”

No. Past and future; the pile of coins either have a potential to become art, or it is a story; a narrative. This pile of coins once was part of something great, now, they are just coins.

Not everything should be preserved, and the police as guardians of art is hilarious.