Back when I was in college, I used to go to the campus police bicycle auction each semester, partly because I thought it was really f*cked up that they just took random bikes that belonged to random people who may have vanished from the face of the Earth for all we know, and partly because I needed a bike. But the problem was that these bikes were all really ugly and I was poor, so I never wasted my $5 on any of them, and I just walked everywhere like Caine from Kung Fu.

I never actually wondered if those bikes were ever purchased or what eventually became of them, but for the sake of this post making sense – cycling is also a sport – I lost many nights of sleep over the years wondering if those bikes ever found homes. And now, I’m hoping that they were purchased by Israeli artist Nirit Levav, who originally focused her creativity on fashion design but eventually chose to sculpt from raw materials.

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We don’t often get to talk about art around these parts, and that’s a shame, because I like to fancy myself one classy son of a female dog. After all, I’ve used the bathroom at the Louvre. And speaking of bathrooms and art, a Taiwanese art student recently answered the age old question: “Is urinating considered art?” The answer? You bet your golden showers it is.

While going to the bathroom one day, Wong Tin Chuen noticed some blood in his urine. While that would make me scream like a battered child, Cheun thought to himself, “Hey, that looks a little like Iron Man’s helmet!” So did Cheun go to the hospital to have his abdominal pains, dehydration and bloody urine examined? Of course not. He went shopping for a new toilet.

He took about two months to find a toilet bowl with a similar oblong shape to the outline of Iron Man’s face. Then he was eating edible pigmentation and successfully produced red, black and green urine. He arranged the colored urine to make it look like the character, and used his saliva to create foam for touching up. He needed to keep adding spit to his work while waiting for the judges to get to him during the contest. And of course, his artwork had produced a foul odor at the exhibition. (M.I.C. Gadget via a delightful attempt by Google to translate the China Times)

“Why on Earth would he do this,” asked every sane person who doesn’t possess a predilection to play with his own urine. Because Cheun won $400,000 for his new “blood urine” art…

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