Little house on the moon: is space the artworld's final frontier?

Swedish artist Mikael Genberg is crowdsourcing money to launch his lunar sculpture Moonhouse. Is it just one more piece of cosmic clutter or will it go where no art has gone before?

In space, no one can hear you criticise art. No one can touch it or see it either, except an occasional visiting astronaut, a powerful telescope, or aliens. And yet, space is art's final frontier.

In 2002, Damien Hirst sent a painting into space. It was a miniature example of his expensive, multicoloured spot paintings. But Beagle 2, the British attempt to make a mark on Mars and was carrying Hirst's artwork lost contact before it ever landed on the red planet, and was presumably destroyed. Perhaps it's just as well that the aliens did not get their first impression of human beings from a Damien Hirst painting. (Unless, of course, they seized Beagle 2 and, after seeing how rubbish our art is, called off their planned invasion.)

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