What would Grace Slick say?* — Giant Pink Rabbit Appears on Italian Mountainside

Just in from joehead marycherry [quite possibly the best name of the day and perhaps even the year to date: it's certainly in the top three. But I digress...] is the news that a giant pink bunny has just been erected on an Italian mountainside where it will remain for the next 20 years.

"The 200–foot–long toy rabbit [toy? What makes it a toy, I ask?] lies on the side of the nearly one–mile–high (5,000 feet) Colletto Fava mountain in northern Italy's Piedmont region," Ananova reported.

The Viennese art group Gelatin designed the giant soft sculpture and says it was "knitted by dozens of grannies out of pink wool."

Said Gelatin member Wolfgang Gantner, "It's supposed to make you feel small, like Gulliver. You walk around it and you can't help but smile."

Huh.

As I recall, through a memory dimly, Gulliver was relatively big and it was the six–inch–tall Lilliputians who did him in. No matter — let's move on.

Gelatin says the bunny's not just for petting: you can climb its 20–foot sides and relax and picnic on its belly or ears.

Better wait a few days after a heavy rain, though: ever smell a factory full of wet wool?

The rabbit is expected to remain on the mountain until 2025, though it's not clear if it's expected to have disintegrated by then or if that's the date certain for its deconstruction by Gelatin, with pieces no doubt to be auctioned at one of the world–of–the–future's great auction houses in Beijing or Shanghai.

I asked my crack research team (the latest and no doubt not the last iteration) to explain to me why it was that I was only learning of this shocking development today when it had been widely reported as long ago as September 20 when the Guardian ran a nice feature about it.

Not surprisingly, the team simply sat there with their usual blank expressions of bewildered befuddlement, drool sliding down their chins.

The cleaning bill around here is astronomical.

Good thing I charge plenty to visit.

Expenses can eat up your venture capital in a hurry.

Get me Sequoia on the hot line, would you? I need another infusion.

Oh, yes, one last thing — Claes Oldenburg, call your studio: your rabbit has finally turned up.

*Go ask Alice

[via marycherry and Ananova]