Magister Ludi (7): Immaterial Captions
By:
June 1, 2010
Yves Klein: judo expert, amphetamine guzzler, Knight of the Order of St. Sebastian, premature expirer and artist. He patented a colour; he turned the urine of gallery-goers blue; he wrote a monotone symphony; he directed a one-day play in which everybody in the world was an actor; he burned canvases. Yves Klein is the colossal personality who has been chosen to launch a new flavour of Magister Ludi challenge: the caption contest.
In the picture above, Klein is casting 20 grams of gold into the River Seine in Paris. The gentleman with him, Dino Buzzati, is holding a burning receipt. Just prior to this, Klein had sold Buzzati one of his Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, an arbitrarily sized quantity of air. Buzzati had paid the required fee (the gold) and Klein had given him the receipt in return. But only by throwing the gold in the river and burning the receipt could complete immateriality be achieved.
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The rubric:
- As Lusor Ludi, your job is to formulate a caption that adds meaning, nonsense, seriousness, humour, dialogue, commentary, or some combination of all, to the image.
- The Lusor Ludi who concocts the funniest and/or cleverest and/or most absurd caption, as judged by me, will be crowned Victor Ludi.
- The Victor Ludi will win a copy of The Idler’s Glossary (signed and personally dedicated by co-author and HiLobrow.com editor, Joshua Glenn).
- Lusores Ludi should add their captions as comments to this thread by 9PM EST on Sunday 13 June.
- There is no limit to the number of captions that each Lusor Ludi can submit.