Robert Gober “Bag of Doughnuts” / accidentally eaten

(In 1989, a critic/curator named Ed Brzezinski accidentally devoured a Gober sculpture on display at Cooper Gallery in New York.

“Look, it was an honest mistake,” Brzezinski said. “I was hungry. I’d been drinking and I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I noticed this bag of doughnuts sitting on a pedestal. Plain doughnuts with no sugar. I figured somebody had brought them and then gotten tired of them. So I grabbed one and bit it. It tasted stale.”

Gallery attendants immediately noticed Brzezinski’s act and ejected him from the space. By this time, however, Brzezinski discovered that Gober had coated his doughnuts with Roplex, a preservative chemical. “I threw up. An ambulance took me to the St. Vincent’s Hospital. They said that if the chemical was dry, it goes right out of your system. If it’d been liquid, it would have killed me.”

“What is upsetting me is how the art community is now acting like I was a saboteur,” he concluded. “This won’t be good for my career.”)