I can’t find much information about this–I’m seriously hoping that it’s a hoax (nothing in Snopes, though) because to contemplate someone actually doing something like this (and people letting him get away with it) is just a little bit too much for me.
In a nutshell: this asshole hires kids to catch a dog, chains it up at an “art exhibition,” tells everyone not to feed it, and lets it starve in the gallery. And now he’s been chosen to represent his country in another exhibition.
I’m not sure who I’m more disgusted with: the asshole who did this, all the sheep who followed his instructions and didn’t feed the poor dog, or the misguided wastes of air who consider this guy enough of an “artist” that they want him representing their country.
:mad:
There’s a petition against the guy online (I think it’s trying to get him pulled from representing his country, but I can’t read it because it’s in Spanish)–however, I’m not sure I’m allowed to post a link to it so I won’t. If a mod says I can, I’ll come back and post it.
Personally, I think chaining this guy up and not letting anyone feed him might be way more “artistic” than killing an innocent dog. But hey, that’s just me.
The translation of the Spanish written article has some interesting points:
While I still think it’s disturbing, it doesn’t sound like the dog’s suffering was created or prolonged for the exhibit, merely brought into the open so people were facing his death head on instead of being blind to his suffering, and thousands others like him.
I’m not sure I call things like this “art”, but it is…something. Consciousness raising, one would hope. Except that the blogosphere has turned it against him, making it HIS fault that the dog died, instead of acknowledging that thousands of sick street animals - not to mention people - die starving every day, and had the artist not used this dog, he would have died anyway.
I was all ready with the RO until I read that, I have to admit.
Thank you for that. I still don’t approve of what he did–I don’t care if the dog was just a “sick street animal,” to put it on display and allow it to die without trying to help it is still pretty reprehensible to me, and I think he could have gotten his message across in a less shocking way.
I still feel bad for the dog, but my RO has lessened somewhat (a little, anyway) after reading the translation.
I hope that he at least managed to accomplish what he claimed to be trying to do.
According to the gallery director, there was ample food, and the dog didn’t die, but escaped. This seems likely to me, since newspapers report that the dog disappeared from the exhibit in one day, and that “you are what you read” (in Spanish) was spelled out in dog food as part of the exhibit. The artist refuses to discuss whether the dog is dead, and has criticised his critics, pointing out that no one released the dog, fed it, or alerted authorities. The dog was already sick and starving when he picked it up, apparently.
Wow. I think that’s really interesting (and very artistic, too). It really makes a statement, and this thread is a part of that. Very interesting. What an inspired concept.
Tricky stuff. He did have a good point but his message failed miserably in that nobody is talking about the issue of stray dogs but of his cruelty towards this one.
Why is taking a starving animal off the street and confining it with no access to food or medical care a better alternative to just leaving it on the street where it might still be free to find food or a caring human who will actually get is some help? I guess I don’t get “art”.
I saw the early reports about this on LiveJournal several days ago, and I never commented, but I suppose I will here:
The way I heard it, he found the stray, which was on the brink of death, and took it to his exhibition, made a little space for it, and there it stood. According to the stories linked on LJ, the dog died the following day. In my book, all the artist did was change the place it died; if he’d left it on the street, a day away from starvation, it would have died anyway.
I can’t find any original news stories that say that the artist told people not to feed the dog. That seems to have been made up by the person whose blog is cited by the thread you linked to, so unless someone can produce a credible news source stating that, I’ll have to consider that false. Actually, the most appalling thing about it was that this dog was surrounded by people who could have fed it if they’d wanted to, but they ignored it, just like they’d ignore it on the street. People only cared about it after they heard it had died. Which is a pretty sad comment on humanity, really, and the kind of thought you’d expect an artist to provoke.
The cited blog has a lot more pictures, including one with lots of people standing around in the background. As far as I’m concerned, the people who stood around and did nothing are more to blame than the artist; he may not have fed the dog, but he did bring it somewhere where there were lots of people who should have fed it.
Art is supposed to be fake. No one believes for a minute that the actors shot on the TV are dead. More importantly the dog was the ward of the artist, not the onlookers. It was the responsibility of the artist to care for the dog. It is reasonable to assume that when a “civilized” person presents you a starving dog in the name of art, the dog has had make-up applied to make it look as if it were starving.
On the plus side, it should be easy to get this asshole convicted of a crime related to animal cruelty.
Edit: if it was absolutely required that an animal die for his art, the artist should have presented a dog that was put down humanely as the dog that was previously displayed.
I agree. I don’t see that the artist had any particular obligation to keep the dog alive just because he slightly changed the circumstances of its death. If any of the people who saw the exhibition were upset by the dog’s condition, presumably they had he choice to feed it (the artist even comments that nobody who saw the installation fed the dog, which implies that they had the opportunity).
I don’t see how the artist is any more “cruel” toward the animal than anyone who could have done something for the stray dog but didn’t. It can even be argued that in increasing the visibility of the dog’s plight, he was helping it, even if nobody exercised their option to feed it.
Sure the dog may have died on the street anyway and thousands of others do, but this guy went to the effort to capture this dog, take it into his custody and do nothing for it and possibly preventing anyone else from doing something for it. Suppose this were a homeless man who was sick and starving and near death and the “artist” took him in and locked him in a small windowed room so everyone could watch him die? The man was going to die anyway, so what’s the big deal if he just changed the place where the event occured?
The answer is once you take in an animal or a human you are taking responsibility for their care. If you don’t want to be responsible and provide food, water, shelter and medical care then you don’t take in that animal or human or you pass them off to some authority that will provide it. Had he turned the dog in to an animal shelter it may have been euthanized but at least it wouldn’t have suffered any longer.
If the dog is inside a museum and part of an exhibit, I would assume that the artist or curator is feeding the dog and that my contribution to the dog’s well being is covered in the price of my ticket. It would never even occur to me that the artist brought the dog inside to let it starve to death.
As soon as he brought the dog inside, he was morally responsible for its welfare. Attempting to pawn that off, calling it “art” is unacceptable.
I think that may have been kind of the point of the exhibit, actually. You’re arguing that, if you are confronted by a homeless man, sick and starving and near death, and you don’t do anything for them, then their death isn’t your responsibility. You’re suggesting that if you don’t involve yourself, you are absolved of any blame. I suspect the artist was trying to point out how that may not really be true.
If that turns out to be the case, then it would change my opinion of the whole thing. I guess where I differ from your view is that I don’t really see the dog as his responsibility just because he moved it from one place to the other. So while I don’t think he had any particular obligation to take care of it, he also wouldn’t have had any right to stop anybody else from taking care of it.
Hmm… I guess my problem with that is that the artist didn’t lock the dog into a small windowed room. People were apparently able to interact with the dog and had the chance to feed it, etc. If an artist invited a homeless person to be a part of his art installation, I don’t see where he’d have any particular obligation to keep that person alive, either, as long as the whole thing was voluntary on the part of the homeless person.
Of course, in either case it of course becomes a huge problem if the artist were to prevent other people from helping.
That is a very good point. Do we know whether spectators were aware of the circumstances? Also, while normally I agree with you that it’s not intuitive that a museum and/or artist wouldn’t take care of an animal that’s part of an installation, apparently the dog in this case was clearly malnourished, sick, etc.
I am not sure about feeding a dog that is being shown as part of an exhibition in a museum. I have seen plenty of artworks that I thought I could easily fix with duct tape or a Sharpie. Yet even in the absence of a sign saying “don’t piece this sculpture together” I know I am not supposed to, and that trying to do so would end with a nice gentleman escorting me out of the museum.
Would anyone here have been as bold as to rip a dog treat from the sign on the wall and given it to the dog? With a security guard standing in the corner?