Art, or at least real art, is all about suffering. An artist has to cut open their soul and pour it onto a canvas or hammer it into a sculpture, but the art connoisseur sometimes must suffer as well. They have to smear the painting directly onto their eyes, try to swallow a sculpture whole, or—as an Italian man at the Serralves Museum in Portugal recently discovered—fall straight into an eight-foot hole. This comes from Publico (via Gizmodo), which says the pit that the man fell into was part of Anish Kapoor’s Descent Into Limbo, a giant circular hole that’s painted with a ridiculously black paint that’s so ridiculously black that it’s hard for people to tell whether or not it’s a real pit or just a black circle (once again, it’s a real pit).
The black hole was supposedly surrounded by museum employees and warning signs indicating that patrons shouldn’t recklessly leap into it, but there was no physical barrier protecting anyone from the dangerous art. The man who fell in the hole was briefly hospitalized, but we can only assume that he came through the experience with a new appreciation for Kapoor’s weird installations.
Speaking of, Gizmodo notes that Kapoor was the creator of Chicago’s Cloud Gate—a.k.a. the crazy chrome Bean—and Curbed says he sued the NRA earlier this year for putting the sculpture in one of its terrorist propaganda videos (our words, not his). That means he’s cool in our book, so we think his terrifying black pit is totally blameless in this weird incident.