Canine artist "Jack" is selling a work titled
"Half-Chewed Cole Haan Wingtip" on eBay. So far bidding has reached $368, with 1 day of bidding remaining.
This description is offered of the artist:
Jack has been active for some time in the world of artistic defacement popularized by prominent figures such as Banksy. However, only recently have his works received critical acclaim through public notoriety and the rise of social media. He is a two-year-old Dalmatian mix who started his life on the streets of rural Virginia before being detained by a county animal control facility and then adopted by his current owner, whose many possessions have become blank canvases for Jack's defacement techniques. Some of his earlier performance and mixed-media works include Berber Carpet Removal, 400-Thread-Count Sheet Shredding No. 1, A Million Pieces of a Bluetooth Headset, Exposing the Mysterious Innards of a Couch Cushion, Urinating on My Owner's Sister's Bed, Freeing of the Garbage from the Shackles of the Glad Bag, and of course, the well-known 400-Thread-Count Sheet Shredding No. 2.
This isn't a hoax. The artist is clearly identified as canine, so the buyer knows what he or she is getting. But it did remind me of the
Unraveled Weaving Hoax from 1974, in which the owners of an Afghan hound dog entered an old mitten he had chewed (below) into a local art contest, and it won a prize.
And, of course, the most famous animal-art hoax was 1964's
Pierre Brassau, Monkey Artist, in which critics raved about Pierre's work, before they realized that he was a chimpanzee.
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