Magnum Opus Number One

You know how, in history books (or Wikipedia articles), things are split into periods (Cubism c.1907 - 1925, The Beatles 1960 - 1970, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 - 2015)? Well, it's often hard to know exactly when something started.

People gradually realise that there is a something and then try to think back to when it might have started.

This isn't the case with the major artistic movement of the 21st Century. Shoelaceism began at 9:15 in the evening of the 2nd of October 2014 when the renowned shoelaceist, NickMog, created the world 's first shoelace masterpiece. The movement's success was assured when, at 7:41 the following evening, he unveiled, to an eagerly waiting world, his Magnum Opus (named after an ice-cream and the TXTrs spelling of a cephalopod mollusc). The original digital file was swiftly acquired by a fantastically rich collector who keeps it on a diamond-encrusted USB stick in his deepest vault. NickMog, in keeping with artistic tradition, died in abject poverty 87 years later. In a garret.*

*Some historians feel the need to point out that NickMog's traditional end was only achieved by the means of a will which donated all of the untold millions (which he had acquired in the course of his long and disgustingly sybaritic and avaricious life) to charity** with the transaction taking retrospective effect from precisely one second before his life was judged to have ended. And the same historians also point out the similarity in the definitions of "Garret" and "Luxury Penthouse Apartment".

** The NickMog Foundation - which is dedicated to immortalising the memory of the "greatest artist the world has ever known".