I pit this "artist" (warning: animal cruelty)

[Boyo_Jim]

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I generally don’t walk into art museums with a pocketful of kibble.

Who would know that they were going to encounter a starving dog inside an art museum? Who would assume that it would be ok to go get a hotdog from a vendor outside and toss it on the exhibit floor to feed the dog? Who would have thought that they could tear up the part of the exhibit made of dog food and feed it to the dog? Who would have trusted that the stuff that looked like dog food actually was dog food? Or that the apparent intent of the exhibit was to see if they were bold enough to destroy one part of an exhibit to “save” another part? Who would have known that the dog’s life was in their hands?

Nobody.

What might have saved this exhibit?

A dog food vending machine, with a sign that said “Buy Fido a Snausage and save his life.”

Or a bolt cutter under a sign that said, “You may free this dog, and take him away to provide a real home.”

[Terrifel]

@Boyo Jim

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I generally don’t walk into art museums with a pocketful of kibble.

Who would know that they were going to encounter a starving dog inside an art museum? Who would assume that it would be ok to go get a hotdog from a vendor outside and toss it on the exhibit floor to feed the dog? Who would have thought that they could tear up the part of the exhibit made of dog food and feed it to the dog? Who would have trusted that the stuff that looked like dog food actually was dog food? Or that the apparent intent of the exhibit was to see if they were bold enough to destroy one part of an exhibit to “save” another part? Who would have known that the dog’s life was in their hands?

Nobody.

What might have saved this exhibit?

A dog food vending machine, with a sign that said “Buy Fido a Snausage and save his life.”

Or a bolt cutter under a sign that said, “You may free this dog, and take him away to provide a real home.”

All this may be true. And if he had done that, the dog might still be alive. And we wouldn’t be talking about it now, because no one would care. This exhibit, off-target as it likely is, might very well wind up focusing attention on the stray animal plight in Managua for as long as the furor lasts. It’s perhaps not quite the message of universal human solidarity that the guy was probably aiming for, but it’s something.

I wish I could read Spanish. There’s probably all sorts of details being distorted about this story. For one thing, it seems unlikely to me that the dog could have died of starvation in a single day unless she was on the knife-edge of death already. If anything, she would likely have died of dehydration. She certainly looks alert enough in most of the photos.

The thing that boggles my mind, quite frankly, is how the art museum managed to prevent guests from feeding the dog. Seriously, I have worked at a zoo; and in my experience, placing an animal on display sends an immediate subconscious signal to people of all nations that says: “This animal is a public food disposal unit. Please, feel free to offer it whatever snacks you have on your person. Despite the presence of food already in the enclosure, you may safely assume that the animal is not being fed properly here at the zoo, and that you can help. Remember, turtles love Tic-Tacs. Do not concern yourselves with the many signs reading ‘DO NOT FEED THE ANIMALS;’ they exist purely for decorative purposes. Also, under no circumstances should you listen to zoo personnel who ask you not to feed the animals; they are playing a game with you, and you get points for sneaking the animals food behind their backs. If the animals do not respond when you offer them food, you may get their attention by throwing rocks at them.”

[Sapo]

@Terrifel

I wish I could read Spanish.

Feel free to provide the links and I will be glad to translate. After all the pages I have read, I think the picture on post #2 is more or less fair.

[Terrifel]

@Sapo

Feel free to provide the links and I will be glad to translate. After all the pages I have read, I think the picture on post #2 is more or less fair.

I haven’t been able to extract meaning from this line in particular:

Raymond Schnog, chairman of the Humanitarian Association for Animal Protection, said that he did not see how it was made to starve an animal if the pair had lunch with a cliché.

I think we’ve all had lunch with a cliché at some point.

[Sapo]

heh

the original

Liliam Schnog, presidenta de la Asociación Humanitaria para la Protección Animal, dijo que no entiende cómo se dejó morir de hambre a un animal si a la par había una frase hecha con comida

translates to:

Liliam Schnog, president of the Humane Society for Animal Protection, said she could not understand how an animal could be left to starve right next to a sign written in food.

[Terrifel]

Thank you, Sapo. Actually that’s a good example right there. Is the president of the Humane Society a man named Raymond, or a woman named Liliam? If the account can’t even be trusted to provide details like that reliably, how are we supposed to know that any of this is accurate? Did the dog die of starvation? Do we know for certain that it is dead? Was it actually a dog, or will other reports reveal it to be a porcupine or a lawn chair? I want to know about the treatment of the dog, not the sordid history of the Humane Society’s transgendered president.

[Sapo]

Well, since most of the sites covering the story are some flavour or another of animal acitvism group, it is hard to get the details straight. Most of the mainstream media sites I have seen, have the artist refusing to answer whether the dog was fed or what happened to it after the exhibition.

The linked english site in post #2 mentions a myspace page and all that, but it has been removed, so it is hard to verify anything from it.

The whole Raymond-Lillian thing is just flat out weird.

[NicePete]

Maybe the dog is (named K?) is a Hunger Artist.

[Larry_Borgia]

@Sapo

heh

the original

Liliam Schnog, presidenta de la Asociación Humanitaria para la Protección Animal, dijo que no entiende cómo se dejó morir de hambre a un animal si a la par había una frase hecha con comida

translates to:

Liliam Schnog, president of the Humane Society for Animal Protection, said she could not understand how an animal could be left to starve right next to a sign written in food.

If I wanted to, I could chain my cat up just out of reach of a sign saying “please feed me” in cat chow. Since she can’t unchain herself, she would starve to death. I don’t understand why Liliam Schnog doesn’t have the two or three brain cells needed to figure this out.

[Autolycus]

@Wile E

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?

People and animals are different. While that’s a religious view of mine ultimately, but in short I think that if this one animal death, done without cruelty and unneccessary malice, can inspire people to prevent thousands of other animal deaths, then good.

[Miller]

@Terrifel

Thank you, Sapo. Actually that’s a good example right there. Is the president of the Humane Society a man named Raymond, or a woman named Liliam? If the account can’t even be trusted to provide details like that reliably, how are we supposed to know that any of this is accurate? Did the dog die of starvation? Do we know for certain that it is dead? Was it actually a dog, or will other reports reveal it to be a porcupine or a lawn chair?

Well, that’s modern art for you.

[Boyo_Jim]

@Autolycus

People and animals are different. While that’s a religious view of mine ultimately, but in short I think that if this one animal death, done without cruelty and unneccessary malice, can inspire people to prevent thousands of other animal deaths, then good.

Chaining it up to starve while on display seems inherently cruel to me. Also, wee seem to have only the artist’s word that the dog was on the brink of death to start – is the artist a vet as well? How would he know how close this animal was to death?

Though, with all this ambiguity, I’m beginning to think we’ve all been whooshed, and the dog was released, brought home, or something. Frankly, I think if it had died, it would have remained part of the display.

[Contrapuntal]

@Wile E

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.

I agree 100%. If you take possession of an animal in distress, your immediate responsibility is to relieve that distress to the best of your ability, not to use the animal as a tool to further your personal agenda. Who cares if no one else fed the dog? If the artist chained it up without access to food and water, then he was being deliberately cruel.

Not to mention the fact that the first place he should have taken the dog to is the veterinarian’s office, not a museum.

[Larry_Borgia]

@Autolycus

People and animals are different. While that’s a religious view of mine ultimately, but in short I think that if this one animal death, done without cruelty and unneccessary malice, can inspire people to prevent thousands of other animal deaths, then good.

Most everybody thinks people and animals are different. If it’s a choice between an animal and a human starving to death, almost everyone’s going to pick the human to feed, maybe even with the animal’s meat. But that’s not what was going on here.

This isn’t going to do a damn bit of good in saving human or animal life. It’s only going to impress a few pomo fools, and annoy a lot of sane people.

Note: I’m certainly willing, and in fact hoping, to believe there’s something we’re not being told.

[Wile_E]

@Contrapuntal

I agree 100%. If you take possession of an animal in distress, your immediate responsibility is to relieve that distress to the best of your ability, not to use the animal as a tool to further your personal agenda. Who cares if no one else fed the dog? If the artist chained it up without access to food and water, then he was being deliberately cruel.

Not to mention the fact that the first place he should have taken the dog to is the veterinarian’s office, not a museum.

I should know by now not to use analogies here because they will become the focus and be nitpicked to death. Thank you for getting the point of my post and for your agreement.

[Terrifel]

@Autolycus

People and animals are different. While that’s a religious view of mine ultimately, but in short I think that if this one animal death, done without cruelty and unneccessary malice, can inspire people to prevent thousands of other animal deaths, then good.

I wouldn’t go that far, myself. The use of animals can and does benefit humanity in a lot of ways, but choreographing their suffering for artistic purposes is questionable at best, even if it ultimately benefits other animals.

This whole situation strikes me as the sort of thing Andy Kaufman might have tried. Tell everyone the dog died, watch the white folks go crazy, and bask in the publicity. Either way, this is likely to be a watershed moment in the guy’s career. Only an extremely audacious or an extremely bad artist (or both) would try to convey a serious message with a big-eyed puppy dog. Whatever he’s done in the past, whatever happens next, he’s going to just be “The Dog Guy” for the foreseeable future.

On the other hand, I suppose it’s also entirely possible the dog is really dead after all. I could see that happening. The guy gets the scrawniest dog he can locate for his exhibition, fully expecting to take it back to wherever he got it afterward, and the dog suffers some kind of fatal dietary episode instead, after guilty onlookers discreetly feed the thing 3 1/2 pounds of reception food. What do you tell people then-- that your whole “starving dog” motif was a bluff and people shouldn’t take your work seriously? Or do you try to brazen it out?

[Cervaise]

Thought experiment:

Let’s say the artist didn’t actually take physical possession of the dog. (Let’s also assume that the story being reported is more or less accurate, and that something significant isn’t being lost in translation or distorted by those with fierce agendas.) Let’s say that the artist, upon finding the dog on the street, lying weakly on the sidewalk, ignored by passers-by, instead of taking it for exhibition in the gallery, simply stood on the opposite side of the street with a video or movie camera, filming in medium shot the plight of the animal and the disinterest of the passing humans. Let’s say the artist continued this shot for several hours, capturing the dog’s suffering, and the total lack of intervention by anyone. And let’s say this filming lasted long enough that eventually the artist, and the camera, observed the animal’s death. And let’s say the artist then takes this film or video, sets up a screen in the gallery, and exhibits this footage in a repeating loop. The dog is not physically present, but the death is still very real, captured and displayed in now timeless media.

Be honest: How many people would still condemn the artist for failing to help the dog? I believe the argument would be more or less the same, with pretty much the same players, with only a slight tweak in vocabulary. Instead of “the artist, by taking possession of the dog, takes responsibility for its well-being,” we would have, “the artist, by noticing the animal’s suffering, should be responsible for helping it.” (This is a supposition, yes, but come on: if you think I’m wrong, you’re a fool. The same debates have played out with respect to journalists, especially videographers, who point their cameras at some tragic event or other.)

The argument, therefore, becomes one of denial: “It’s okay if the dog dies if I don’t notice it. I assume no moral burden if I close my eyes to the agony around me.”

And that, frankly, is total bullshit.

The artist (again, presuming the story is being represented accurately) made his point, and he made it so forcefully that people are reacting to him instead of acknowledging the general culpability of society (including themselves) to tolerate a degree of suffering in our midst. That is a terrible, indeed shattering, observation, so difficult to internalize that we attack the messenger who brings it to our attention.

Not only can I not condemn the artist, I applaud him.

[Airman_Doors_USAF]

@Cervaise

Not only can I not condemn the artist, I applaud him.

Woohoo! I can’t wait to make my feature film about the suffering of animals at the hands of hunters by tying them to a post and letting random people blaze away at them. That’ll get the point across, it sure will.

And can we stop calling this “art”? It’s because of this that people like me despise everything that art stands for. If this is art then an armed robbery is performance art.

[stretch]

@Cervaise

Thought experiment:

Let’s say the artist didn’t actually take physical possession of the dog. (Let’s also assume that the story being reported is more or less accurate, and that something significant isn’t being lost in translation or distorted by those with fierce agendas.) Let’s say that the artist, upon finding the dog on the street, lying weakly on the sidewalk, ignored by passers-by, instead of taking it for exhibition in the gallery, simply stood on the opposite side of the street with a video or movie camera, filming in medium shot the plight of the animal and the disinterest of the passing humans. Let’s say the artist continued this shot for several hours, capturing the dog’s suffering, and the total lack of intervention by anyone. And let’s say this filming lasted long enough that eventually the artist, and the camera, observed the animal’s death. And let’s say the artist then takes this film or video, sets up a screen in the gallery, and exhibits this footage in a repeating loop. The dog is not physically present, but the death is still very real, captured and displayed in now timeless media.

Be honest: How many people would still condemn the artist for failing to help the dog? I believe the argument would be more or less the same, with pretty much the same players, with only a slight tweak in vocabulary. Instead of “the artist, by taking possession of the dog, takes responsibility for its well-being,” we would have, “the artist, by noticing the animal’s suffering, should be responsible for helping it.” (This is a supposition, yes, but come on: if you think I’m wrong, you’re a fool. The same debates have played out with respect to journalists, especially videographers, who point their cameras at some tragic event or other.)

The argument, therefore, becomes one of denial: “It’s okay if the dog dies if I don’t notice it. I assume no moral burden if I close my eyes to the agony around me.”

And that, frankly, is total bullshit.

The artist (again, presuming the story is being represented accurately) made his point, and he made it so forcefully that people are reacting to him instead of acknowledging the general culpability of society (including themselves) to tolerate a degree of suffering in our midst. That is a terrible, indeed shattering, observation, so difficult to internalize that we attack the messenger who brings it to our attention.

Not only can I not condemn the artist, I applaud him.

Sorry, Cervaise, but this is different. In your thought experiment, someone else could have intervened in the dog’s life and saved it during the filming. By taking the dog to the museum, the “artist” actively prevented the dog from receiving any possible help. So I can and do condemn him for his actions.

[WhyNot]

@stretch

Sorry, Cervaise, but this is different. In your thought experiment, someone else could have intervened in the dog’s life and saved it during the filming. By taking the dog to the museum, the “artist” actively prevented the dog from receiving any possible help. So I can and do condemn him for his actions.

Could have, perhaps, but how likely is it that a city with starving dogs on the street is home to many no-kill shelters and do-gooders? If there were so many people looking to save Nativity’s life when he was a street dog, why didn’t they, in the long period of time they had while he was starving to death on the street? You don’t get to one day away from death by starvation all at once.

And maybe your hypothetical “could have” person saved another dog since they weren’t burdened with this one. Maybe if he had picked up Nativity three other dogs and a mule would have died instead.

Maybe now someone will pay for an animal shelter in that city, since here we are thousands of miles away talking about it. Maybe not. Either way, Nativity won’t care much, being dead and all.