Money For Old Rope

 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.

Rope Circle
Wendy Taylor (b. 1945)
Photo Credit: Anthony McIntosh/Art/UK. [CC BY-NC-ND]

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 self-deprecating but often funny non sequiturs.

And that's exactly what this is; a joke with no punchline, just an idea and a price tag.

And it looks great, largely because it looks pretty much like any other conceptual art installation. Piles of discarded rubbish have been a common sight in art galleries for decades, but this is the first one to do it quite so sarcastically and knowingly. It's as if If Shrigley is gamely admitting that, well, this is all a bit stupid.

The issue here is that, at its root, this is art about the value of art, about what people are willing to pay for an idea, about which ideas have value and which don't.

I don't think the financial value of art is all that interesting. What rich people do with their money is about as relevant to me as what they have for breakfast. Making a snarky comment about the value of art in a gallery that's struggling to survive financially (SFG [Stephen Friedman Gallery] announced some pretty huge losses earlier this year) does feel a bit awkward too. It's as if Shrigley is saying: "You lot would buy any old crap, wouldn't you?" Yet this gallery is having quite a hard time selling things.

Maurizio Cattelan, the artist now famed for making a golden toilet that was stolen, made a similar point - in a more aesthetically impactful way - when he taped a banana to a wall at an art fair in 2019 and sold it for more money than anyone should ever spend on a banana. But that was then, when the art world was a lot more boomy...

In a very Shrigley way, the work's disarming. Look at you, wandering around a fancy gallery trying to think deep thoughts about piles of rope. It's obscene, ridiculous, funny. I want to pick it apart, untangle its conceptual threads and prove that they don't weave into anything sensible - but obviously they don't. The threads are just a big mess. Part of me wants to go all lyrical and describe the colours and fabrics, the smell, the history implied in each strand, the narratives of the hands that once pulled these ropes and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But I don't think that's the point. It really is just some old rope. And that's kind of great.

(Eddy Frankel, The Guardian, 2025)

Paying a million pounds for a pile of discarded rubbish tells us far more about the buyer than the seller. Shrigley, like countless conceptual artists before him, has realised that there is no shortage of people ready to part with their money for a load of old rubbish. No doubt he does think that any old crap can be sold to the gullible. 

Anyway, time to eat a banana and arrange all my odd socks on the front door. And of course, I'll invite Eddy Frankel round to untangle their conceptual threads and to describe the colours and fabrics, the smell and the history implied in each one.