Despite a learned article published in the journal, Nature there's something cheerful about this scientific endeavour that might verge otherwise on the frivolous.
In keeping with the seriousness of the subject I sought chewing gum images in google and discovered someone in London paints lovely pictures on said flattened pavement gum.
This picture of gobbed out chuddy looks like a Matisse version of Atlas grasping the world but shot from the rear and maybe when he was drunk and bragging, Atlas that is. "Look at me, I can shift this. Heave! Oh, me back's gone." The drifting head doesn't work though, it's too ephemeral, like an afterthought.
Forensics suggest someone was chewing gum then popped in a new bit which proved too much. Enjoined, both are spat out and lo the chewer passes on with nary a thought to either gum or pavement aesthetics, or pavement sticketics for that matter because that stuff's a bugger if it gets on your shoe. Chewing requires no skill whereas painting requires great skill but as an example of masticatory expellent art this must stand up there among the greats.
On a final note I don't want to denigrate chewing completely as an artistic modus after all do wasps not chew their habitation into existence and is there not art in their mindless geometrics? So let us hear it for chewing as a means to many ends even if some are less obvious than others.
