As part of a municipal visual arts project, a neon 'Empire' sign containing a faulty light bulb was once hung on the wall of a pub in Brunswick Lane in Glasgow, Scotland. The sign -- the central part of a ?200,000 work by Turner-prize winning artist Douglas Gordon -- was deliberately wired so that the letter P would blink to match that of the Empire Hotel in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo. The installation, Gordon explained, aimed to show that "what happens in real life is a reflection of what happens in cinema."
Real life intervened in July 2003, when a repairman inadvertently "fixed" the flickering bulb, not realizing that it was in fact a valuable piece of "art."
[Glasgow City Council indignantly denied that their workmen had repaired the sign. Ironically, they probably should have; the bulb had been flickering since 1998.]
[To celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent lamp, the Corning Glass Works manufactered a foot-long, hand-blown, 75,000-Watt light bulb.
]
Sources
ananova.com, 4th July 2003; Daily Mail
