An artist puts old rope up for sale for over a million dollars: “By weight, it actually has a very good value”

For the past eight months, British artist David Shrigley has been on a mission that sounds more like a scavenger hunt gone wrong than a contemporary art project: collecting 10 tons of used rope from ports, climbing schools, window-cleaning companies, mountaineers, and even wind farms.

Now comes the part he insists is the true finale — selling the entire heap for one million pounds, roughly $1.27 million. His inspiration behind the project was the euphemism “money for old rope.”

Why David Shrigley collected 10 tons of rope

Shrigley plans to unveil the full mountain of rope at a gallery in London’s upscale Mayfair district. It’s both an exhibition and a sales pitch, an invitation for a private collector, foundation, or museum to give this tangle of material a home — and, he hopes, see it as more than industrial waste.

For Shrigley, the installation pokes at a perennial question in the art world: why we assign value to some ideas and not others. If a banana duct-taped to a wall — an infamous work by Maurizio Cattelan — sold at auction for more than $6 million, he suggests, why shouldn’t 10 tons of rope spark its own debate?

“An intriguing object in itself”

“It’s a real non-aesthetic installation, but at the same time you can’t really escape from the aesthetics of it,” Shrigley says. “The rope becomes an intriguing object in itself.”

And with his usual dry humor, he adds: “A giant artwork, pound for pound or kilo for kilo, represents excellent value.”

Inside the Stephen Friedman Gallery

The installation is now on view at London’s Stephen Friedman Gallery, where visitors can wander through the maze of knots and coils, losing themselves in a piece that feels both chaotic and oddly meditative.

Shrigley admits he could make an easier living focusing solely on painting, but that’s not why he makes art. “Having these kinds of conversations [proving that price and value are very different things] are part of the joy of it,” he told The Art Newspaper.

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