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Talking about Byars's search for perfection, people do not want to talk about how chintzy the objects actually are, the very wide distance they lie from perfection; for Byars perfection meant painting something round gold. Byars objects are imitations of perfection. In comparison to the capitalistically fueled artists of intransient monumental capital P Perfection, Koons, Kapoor, etc., Byars' admitted failed attempts (though sometimes getting close) is what make them so pathetically and pathotically human: that Byars achieved some level of artistic immortality, still speaking his name today, with these sometimes-above-adequate costume objects is part of their beautiful magical appeal, knowing the shaman's showman behind the curtain is just a man, and is going to die, and did, some nonsensical death like the rest of us, and within there being some sort of moral tale about a beggar - rather than the alchemist- creating gold from tin simply because he got everyone to believe in it because believing, despite evidence to the contrary, just made for a better world, the premise of every religion, and his objects won't be a testament to perfection or immortality but something way more human than that, something stubbornly willfully misguided.
