The Art Assignment - Stakeout!

This is my first ever blogpost in English and I am sorry to
all of my Slovak readers but this is a response to the Art Assignment and I want the people who created it to be able to read my response (I am not sure if they are actually going to read it because they have tons of responses coming in but maybe they will).

The Art Assignment is a new youtube project curated by Sarah Green who is a wife of John Green, (one of the vlogbrothers) who also takes part in the Art Assignment. Every week Sarah interviews one artist about their work and the artist gives the people watching the video an art assignemnt to do. People who want to participate finish the assignment and document it in some way - they take pictures or make videos or write a blogpost like I do.

I loved already the first assignment because it was a fun idea and I might do it someday but the second one got me hooked insantly. You can watch the assignment video here. The idea is to take any object and leave it in a public space so that people can interact with this object. Ideally you are there to observe and document what's going on.

My idea was to take a box of chocolate and leave it on an empty coffeeshop table with a note for the person to take some chocolate and then pass the box onto another empty table. Who would have refused to enjoy a small bite of chocolate alongside their coffee?

Sadly I haven't picked the best time to do this because for an hour the coffeeshop was full of people who came there for a meeting of some charity organisation so most of the tables were occupied and not many new people came into the coffeeshop for the first hour I was sitting there.

Anyway I put the chocolate on one of the tables. There was still some stuff left on it so the waitress came to clean it up. She saw the chocolate and was a bit confused at the beginning then she showed it to another waiter. She walked up to their boss asking whether it's ok to leave it on the table. She said yes so the chocolate went back on to the table. A couple of girls approached the table. They must have noticed the chocolate. Sadly I was sitting too far away to see what they are doing but I didn't see them standing up to pass the chocolate onto another table.

After an hour they left, I went to the table to check if they at least took some chocolate. It wasn't on the table. I thought they took it. For this case I brought another box with me. I put it on a table with a reservation on it. The waitress who has first seen the chocolate walked up to me and asked me whether I was doing some kind of research. I said I am doing it as a part of The Art Assignment. She said it was the nicest thing that she has seen in the coffeeshop for the whole day and that she took a picture of it. That was really cool.

She also said that they had to take the first chocolate off the first table because they didn't want to interefere the meeting that was going on but she promised they would put it back up right after they are finished.

Three girls walked up to the table with the reservation on it. The waitress put the chocolate right in front of them probably afraid that they would not notice. I think they thought it is something that the coffeeshop is doing. One of them took one of the chocolates but then they didn't pass it onto another table.

I left after two hours. Nobody passed the chocolate onto another table as the note said and one of the chocolates was still sitting on the shelf behind the counter. I am not sure whether they remembered to put it back onto a table later on but if not, hopefully the staff enjoyed the chocolate. I wouldn't mind. It's my favourite coffeeshop in town and the staff definitely deserves some sweet reward for their great work :)

Doing The Art Assignment was so much fun and I think I made a few people smile and some mouths happy because chocolate makes everything better.

Next assignment will be documented better, I promise.