If you missed the story I can offer a little more detail. Cunningham paid £3,000 for a bungalow teetering on a cliff edge at Knipe Point in Scarborough, north Yorkshire, not far from the scene of the famous Holbeck Hall Hotel cliff collapse 17 years ago. The little house, Cunningham says, ‘will be the next one to fall over the edge’.

Cunningham describes the project as ‘the perfect site-specific installation – a stark reminder of lost dreams, financial disaster and threatening sea levels. It’s global recession and global warming encapsulated.’ The plan is to relay the collapse live via webcam. The house – until recently someone’s home – has become The House, a piece of temporary art.

The media response has been staggering. Within days of Cunningham’s announcement the story had gone global. Reuters picked it up. The BBC World Service (with some 180 million listeners worldwide) ran a live interview with the artist. Reports appeared in print, on TV, on radio and online, from China to Australia to Yorkshire itself. Cunningham’s website was overwhelmed by picture editors scouting for shots to run alongside the story.

So what is the story?

To the casual art enthusiast, The House lies on a continuum of provocative art that runs from Duchamp’s urinal to Damien Hirst’s pickled menagerie and beyond. To the media, The House is something else.

The story sometimes ran quite differently in different media in different countries. In Belfast, the location of a vicious recent property boom-and-bust, this was a piece about the perils of property investment. For Italian environmental website ecologiae.com it is an ongoing nightmare tale of ‘a dream house “eaten” by global warming’.

Interviewers have asked Cunningham to keep in touch. His purchase could, it seems, provoke a series of diverging narratives shaped for different audiences – assuming, of course, that journalists can be found to write the stories (see ‘News futures’, Red Pepper Feb/Mar 2010).

But is it art at all, or simply three thousand pounds’ worth of advertising investment cleverly reframed as social comment? Cunningham may have a social conscience – his recent work as a landscape artist working in paint is, he says, ‘about understanding the social and political context of landscape’ – but he’s also a man of business. He’s £3k in the red and counting (astonishingly, he’s still being charged council tax) and he wants a return on his investment, so you can buy photos and prints via his website, along with advertising space.

Cunningham is busy planning ways to keep the artwork, and so the story, alive. A local composer is writing a piece for performance on the cliff edge. Letters to the artist are being pinned to the house walls. A dinner party – ‘The Last Supper’ – is being planned with a Michelin-starred chef cooking for local and celebrity guests, including ex-minister Clare Short, who will debate the world’s Big Questions as unstoppable forces slowly pull them towards the cliff edge. (Can we pay Cunningham to invite selected others, I wonder?)

And watching all this from the discomfort of their own threatened cliff-top homes are Cunningham’s near-neighbours, whose own keenly-felt target for blame is neither global warming nor the credit crunch, but rather the ground-shaking damage allegedly caused during the recent building of a bypass.

The House reminds me of that clever communist-era Russian play, The Suicide. Nikolai Erdman’s witty 1928 satire follows Semyon, a young, unemployed man whose intended suicide becomes a battleground for rival groups who seek to further their own cause. The feeding frenzy, placed against a frantic inter-war Soviet-communist backdrop, offers deep-seated warnings on human nature, and on the ethics and the absurdity of commandeering personal tragedy.

It’s interesting to ponder just how The House will play worldwide in the media on the day it finally slips over the edge. Only one thing is certain: however the various narratives are spun, Cunningham must know that this bit at least – like the inevitable demise of his second home with a view-to-die-for – will remain well and truly out of his control.