Michael Townsend Explains His Rhode Island Mall-Living Art

You, like the rest of the great internet republic, likely saw that story floating around about Michael Townsend, the artist who snuck into a Rhode Island mall and setup a home in a long-forgotten storage room, while simultaneously documenting the world of mall culture. But until we’d visited Defective Yeti and had been passed along to the artist’s site, we’d only heard from him secondhand. It’s an interesting story and has some details that slipped past the “ain’t this weird” new reports, but doesn’t really go too deep into the actual ideas behind the “art” being created therein.