My G/pa had a gas station/store & bought a wire rack w/ some cheap oil... priced it to make a profit, it was still real cheap.. no one bought it.
He took it & shoved it in the back room for a few months, took it out, dusted it off & priced it Juuust under the Premium brands,, It all sold in a coupla weeks.,.

When I was a student at Guelph I did a performance art piece called "Free Money". I put a small box full of change on a stool and put it in the middle of the main concourse with a sign (Free Money) on it, and hid in a nearby building to photograph the reactions of people with a telephoto lens.
Most people looked around before taking some change. One girl left a note saying "Thanks- I needed bus fair home". Later on, when the money was almost gone, two guys ran out in hoods and capes, dumped the rest into a bag, and ran off.
I had expected it to be gone in a few minutes, but it took most of an afternoon.
Most students are either honest or nervous.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 06/07/13 at 05:01:48:

Weeeell, it's been 37 years and I don't really remember, but I did find the pics I took.
Girl writing note.

Guys dumping money in bag.
http://p1.bikepics.com/2013/06/07/bikepics-2564155-full.jpg
Notice the bell bottoms.

Yea- those guys made it more performance art than conceptual. I think they had put some thought into why the box of money was there and knew someone was at the least watching it, and put on their little show for the observer's benefit. If I had known who they were I would have thanked them, because they added a whole new level to the piece.
At that time at Guelph the dean for the art program (Tom Trischler) was really progressive. He brought in actual practicing artists, rather than academics, to teach a senior level course. I thought it was a great idea, and with his permission took the course three times, and was given credit for three senior level courses. Nobody in Canada at that time was teaching conceptual/performance art at the university level.
The first one I took was with a woman named Jodi Pinto. Her own art at the time was making miniature ancient grave sites in nooks and crannies around the city she lived in. (either Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, I don't remember which). Her first assignment was to make a piece of art that changed with time. My solution to the problem was to crumple up a sheet of open cell foam and freeze it in a container of water. As it melted it un-crumpled and lay flat again. The forms it took as it un-crumpled were visually interesting. Another project involved a performance piece with masks. Another girl in the class and I took it up a notch and made complete costumes- I was a cyborg (half human and half machine) and she was a hermaphrodite (one side was female and the other male, left and right sides different), and we did a scene about being half and half. I am pretty sure she was making a statement about her sexuality. Another girl entered the class with a ying and yang mask covering her entire head and a kimono, took off the kimono, and did a ti chi routine nude, put the kimono back on and left. We were never really sure who it was, which made it a really powerful piece. Anonymous art.
What these courses taught me is that the act of doing art, and the motivation behind it, is just as important as the finished piece, and now I look at all art with that in mind. I bring this into my teaching when I can. I have the students write a note about why they made the choices they did in terms of the elements of design, and how they felt while creating the piece.
I took a painting course from a stuffy academic woman who was more concerned about getting tenure than she was about teaching art. She would get us to set up our paintings in a side by side row and walk along with her markbook and criticize as she marked. After two critiques like that I got frustrated and did a painting of a hand and wrist. I had glued a bag of red paint behind the wrist, and after she had walked the row I jumped up and screaming at the top of my lungs and brandishing a huge carving knife, ran up and slit the wrist. Paint sprayed all over the place, including on some students and their paintings, (I hadn't expected that), some students screamed, (one girl was so mad she punched me in the stomach) and the prof raised my mark from a C ( it wasn't a very good painting) to a B, which further angered some of the students.
(sorry to run on here- I could talk about art for hours.)

That is pretty funny. I will have to try that on someone.
Back in high school we played a similar joke on a girl in my class. I got a hot water bottle, filled it up with mushroom soupmade with vinigar (for the acidy smell) and hung it around my neck. Two other guys and myself sat down in the caf close to her. I faked being sick and pushed hard on the hot water bottle, forcing the soup out along my chin onto the table. The other two guys started eating it with spoons. To give her credit, she turned really green, but did not throw up herself. That wound up with a trip to the office to have a chat with the VP.

"Sorry, dude, I dont have that kinda sense of humor,"
Really?... a severed finger is less gross than vomit?
I do agree with you about America's Funniest Home Videos, though.
I never thought the Three Stooges was funny either.

This is a true story.  THe brother of one of my friends in college has a shop in Santa Fe that sells indian crafts and arts.  He was telling me that when he first opened, he wanted to offer good prices and selection.  He almost went broke.  The owner of another store took him aside and told him to do two things.  First, he was not to put out multiples of any article.  The tourist buyers liked to think that they were buying something unique, or at least unusual.  Second, he was to raise his prices because buyers thought that if you were cheaper than the other stores, that your goods were inferior.  

He followed both pieces of advice, and is still in business, almost 40 years later.