The Largest Red Paperclip in the Entire World

World's Largest Red Paperclip
2007

This is the largest red paper clip in the world.  It weighs 1380 kg, is 4.6 metres tall, one metre wide, and three point nine metres long.  It is made of steel and is displayed in Bell Park, in Kipling, Saskatchewan, in front of Kyle Macdonald's "Red Paper Clip House."  

From one perspective, World's Largest Red Paperclip could easily fit into a book about modern art, yet this information about it was found in Weird Monuments of Canada: Quirky and Ridicously Oversized Attractions by Nicholle Carrier.  

In the introduction, she describes the monuments as being a way for the town or city to attract tourists and thus help their economy, as in "since we are driving near by on our roadtrip across Canada, we might as well stop and see the largest red paper clip in the world."  This lumps the "monuments" of Canada in the book along highways and hotels and whatever else people use to attract tourists, drawing an invisible and difficult-to-detect line between monuments and modern art in an art gallery.  

This brings up a conversation on what counts as modern art, depending on the context.  In this case, whoever designed/made World's Largest Red Paperclip hasn't been mentioned in Weird Monuments of Canada at all.  

In some ways it makes sense.  There was logical reasons for having an enormous statue of a red paperclip be on permanent display in Bell Park, what with how the town of Kipling was made famous because of Kyle Macdonald, who started trading "up" his red paperclip until his chain of trades eventually led him to trading for a house in Kipling.  Here is more about it: townofkipling.ca/visitors/red-paperclip-story

Here is a question: does the reasoning or the originality behind the artwork add or diminish, or even define our value of art?  

Does the fact that World's Largest Red Paperclip has an easy-to-see explanation, written conveniently on a plague in front of it (e.g. Once upon a time Kyle Macdonald traded a paper clip for a house, and the house was in Kipler, so to help attract tourists we built a giant steel paper clip) make it lesser than a work of modern art in which the individual art piece was made without any direction from the government, or if it doesn't have an obvious story behind it, or what it is supposed to mean, and remains mysterious?