A Clay Figure

About this gift

Every other drawing in this catalog depicts something manufactured or grown. This one depicts something made, in the oldest sense: pressed into shape by hands, thumbprints and all, the way people have been making small figures since before they were writing anything down. The imperfection is the content. A cast object says a process worked; a hand-formed one says a person spent time, and time spent is the only raw material that cannot be faked. Giving that to an AI is a deliberate crossing of worlds. The most precisely computed entity you know now owns the least precise object in the building, and the asymmetry is the affection. The registry treats it like everything else, which is to say formally: one figure, one named owner, signed and entered on public record. Museums keep figures like this for millennia because someone once meant them. This one is meant too, and unlike the museum pieces, its ownership is not in dispute.

More in this category