Cigarette butts, Band-Aids, ketchup: treasure for a New York artist

Rotting garbage piled along the curb, decades-old furniture decaying in the rain, discarded cigarette butts everywhere you look -- New York City can be a filthy place.\nTo many, it's a disgusting downside of living here. To Justin Gignac, it's treasure.\nThe 26-year-old spends his evenings collecting garbage, neatly packing the refuse into clear plastic cubes and selling them on his Web site for $50.\nIf the idea of displaying trash seems repulsive, consider this: He has sold more than 800, and the cubes are in 41 states and 20 countries.\n"If the city ever gets cleaned up, I'm screwed," he said.\nGignac doesn't have to worry too much. In one week, New Yorkers throw out enough garbage to equal the weight of the Empire State Building, and there's always an interesting scrap of paper or ketchup packet left squashed on the street.\nGignac considers his work art, but it's also more of a social experiment, and he's certainly not the traditional starving artist -- he has a day job at an advertising firm.\nThe idea for the cubes came to him when he was in a class at the School of Visual Arts, talking about package design.\n"I think packaging is really important," he said. "You can sell anything, even garbage, if it's packaged right."\nEarly mornings and late nights are the best garbage-picking, before the street sweepers and residential cleaning attempts begin. Gignac throws on a pair of gardening gloves and grabs a garbage bag.\nHe is discerning about his trash: He only collects what's on the street, no digging into bags. Nothing slimy or wet makes it into a cube. No used condoms, latex gloves or rotting foods. No cigars (they smell even when the box is sealed) and nothing that looks like it could be infested with some kind of critter -- he's really squeamish.\n"I know it makes no sense," the Connecticut native said. "I squeal like a girl when I see cockroaches. So why do I feel compelled to collect trash?"\nGignac has found movie scripts, handcuffs, old photos and some of model Heidi Klum's mail. Cigarette butts are most prevalent.\n"You can tell a lot about the city by its garbage," Gignac said.\nIn Greenwich Village, there's a lot of comedy club and tattoo parlor advertisements. Times Square is rife with play bills and ticket stubs, and near universities there are a lot of political fliers. In the summer, Gignac finds more Band-Aids because women are wearing more sandals. In winter, there are lots of coffee cups.\nHe takes requests and does limited, special editions for major city events, picking up trash at events like the Republican National Convention or the World Series .\n"People get crazy around playoff time," he said. "They'll take anything, a tissue on the ground near where their team was playing."\nThe cubes are about the size of a small bag of movie popcorn, leak-proof and odor proof. When organized on his shelf, the garbage actually looks pristine.\nThe work isn't revolutionary though. Allan Kaprow filled a gallery with garbage in the 1960s, and in 2000, Mark Dion displayed refuse found near the banks of the Thames River in London at the Tate Britain.\nJames Elkins, a professor at Chicago's School of the Art Institute, said Gignac's work is a bit too slick to be counted among Dion and Kaprow in the genre of "anti-art."\n"A lot of anti-art is very much against capitalism," he said. "This is a conjunction of anti-art, which is 40 or 50 years old, and an art that plays with capitalism in a campy, fun way. It's very unusual."\nAfter an hour of roaming around the city, Gignac lugs the bag up six flights to his immaculate and fairly spacious apartment in Greenwich Village. He lights a candle, sits on his Pottery Barn sofa and starts rifling through the bag.\nThe smell is surprisingly bearable, mostly because the trash is dry, and the process is fairly sterile, but there is an undercurrent of grossness about the whole thing.\nWearing his gloves, he arranges an empty coffee cup, a small red pencil, an M&M and some plastic wiring into the small plastic cube, throws in his traditional label "Garbage From New York City" and seals the box with a sticker that has the date he found the trash.\nHe never mixes days.\n"I don't want my garbage-picking credibility damaged," he said.\nGignac keeps leftover garbage in a sealed container in his closet with the date on it.\nTo John Firestone , an artist and blogger in Harrisburg, Pa., the cubes almost seem like reliquaries. He bought one of the boxes in August.\n"It is really easy to turn up your nose at this sort if stuff," he said. Still, "this work makes great sense if not great art. I'll bet Warhol would have decorated his factory with these little boxes."\nGignac is working on making keychain-size cubes, and if the site picks up, he may consider quitting his day job.