Maybe they’ll sentence him to community service at an animal shelter. :rolleyes:
I’d be behind the artists if they had killed the cat fairly humanely (i.e. how livestock is slaughtered) and then skinned it after it’s death. After all, thousands of cats are legally killed every day.
The torture of the animal is wrong, though. It may still be art, but art of a kind that should not be made.
Peta,
I never said anybody here claimed that art is whatever the artist defines it as, but that is certainly a theme you run into everytime the Republicans try to get rid of the NEA or at least narrow the types of projects the NEA and support.
I have attended an photography exhibit that consisted of pictures of the photographer urinating on photos of politicians. Art? I’d say not, but I was assured that it, in fact, was (I say it was merely a political statement).
I have attended a performance art piece where a couple simulated sex, then cut the woman’s labia with razor blades, ran paintbrushes through the blood, and then flicked the blood onto crude drawings of penises. Art? I didn’t think so, but the gallery hosting it assured me that it was. This had harm being inflicted in the name of art.
I have been told that graffitti is art and that I should tolerate it, and even preserve it. This is art that breaks the law and there is a community that feels the art (and freedom of expression) supercedes the law.
Again, I am not saying that killing the cat was art. I have no problem with defining art somewhat narrowly. But a significant portion of the art community has been saying for a long time that anything can be art and that art is self-defined. If I have had to accept that the above is art, then I have no problem with calling a cat killing art. I also have no problem with punishing the artists.
Now, don’t get me wrong, the actions of these men are truely reprehensible and beyond and excuses, “art” or anything else.
However.
Those of you advocating life imprisonment, torture, and death for these “artists” would do well to take a deep breath and consider if that’s what you really believe. Terrible as this is, the victim was an animal, not a person. Do you really believe that one act of cruelty to animals should carry some of the sentences that have been proposed?
Why are people so quick to suggest that they might vomit when a kitten is painfully killed, but don’t exhibit a similar reaction regarding the cow you had for dinner?
Yes, cows aren’t skinned alive; but, they certainly do suffer much more than that cat did over the course of weeks or even years.
Ignore the “Their muscles ache for freedom”-like sentences, and look at the numbers. This is only scratching the surface.
Excuse me for the slight hi-jack.
Studi
IMO, yes. I don’t care if this wasn’t a person, these sickos need to suffer too. Please don’t try to minimalize the total horror of their crime (itis a crime, it sure in the hell isn’t art) by using the “it was just an animal” excuse. This makes me sicker than most of the horrible things I read daily in the news.
I would like to see food animals killed humanely too, and measures have been taken. Some livestock are getting better tratment before they are slaughtered, but there is still a long way to go.
Deeply disturbing and vile. Of course you can call this commentary “art”, but the artist should have been fully aware of the consequences of his action, and prepared to deal with the likely incarceration. As an artistic statement, he shouldn’t have even attempted bail. He’d better serve his cause by sitting in jail while saying " Meat is murder, so why am I serving time?" T’would make a more forceful statement, to my mind. Wuss.
He could have just as easily made his point by artfully filming a standard slaughter that happens every day. By using a cat, he creates an outrage over the type of animal slaughtered, and then, under the cover of artistic license, asks society to absolve him of a crime. Animal cruelty is a crime in most civilized states. He’s asking us to compare the everyday killing of animals we use for food with those we think of as pets. If he had some real huevos, he’d have then cooked the cat and eaten it on camera. Again, that would articulate his statement a bit better.
So, that’s seeing some shortcomings on a purely rational artistic level. In reality, I think that the idea of filming an animal being killed solely for the purpose of filming it is vile. To cause suffering in order to supposedly call attention to suffering is misguided at best. If you can kill an innocent creature in order to point out that killing is bad, you are no better than those you accuse, and the arguement is voided.
The gallery directors have a serious deficiency of coherent thought. I don’t think that art as a means of discourse should ever be defined by the general moral tone of the times, but there are certain parameters that are wrong when crossed. Gratuitious killing is one of them. They oughtta have the balls to say why that is so.
Of course it is art! Art is anything created to convey or provoke an emotion or idea. A great deal of art is extremely bad. This art is very, very bad. It’s also immoral and illegal.
I could make art by murdering someone and drawing with their intestines. It is art, but it is art which sprang from an act that is immoral and illegal.
stoid
Well said.
Of course it’s art. It has moved us to disgust. Look at the responses on this board!
Having said that, I also agree that this particular form of art deserves the reaction that it has gotten.
As an artist I would support the incarceration of these morons. They can only make artistic statements through destuctive acts. (The cat, vomiting on other works of art, etc.) They are not very good artists. They can only make their point through an act so vile that few can watch or understand their point. We have to be told what they were trying to say. Compare that with the same sentiment that was expressed in a small book most of us have read called “Charlotte’s Web.” It makes the same point about animals to slaughter, but in a way that KIDS can read it. I know that it was a long time before I could eat bacon again after I read that book. That was a true artist.
Dear god no.
What sick fucks.
I am making sure my three kitties get extra hugs tomorrow.
I hope they are electrocuted to death anally.
at the risk of being myself broiled alive:
I tend to come down on the side of the folks saying that we’re maybe overreacting a bit. Ugly though it may be, I knew kids in school who stuffed firecrackers up cats asses, chased them into traffic, pulled the wings off flies etc. Infact in the interest of full disclosure, as recently as highschool (10 years ago) i was know to torch the occasional red and with a bic). I think all of these are fairly horrible, but at the same time I have a hard time keeping a straight face when people start talking about the horrible waste of this cats life.
Huh? as opposed to the truely meaningful important work most cats on this planet are doing? or most life forms for that matter. I mean lets face it, a lot of animals meat gruesome ends everyday. rarely do I go a day without seeing roadkill on my way to work, and we write that off as an (unfortunate, but acceptible) byproduct of our fast paced automotive society.
Ritual animal sacrifices are as old as the hills, and it sounds like that cat had a terrible final seventeen minutes, but its hard to say it was a waste of life when it has provoked such an intense reaction from all of us. It doesn’t sound much worse than being crushed in half by a car, or digesting alive for a couple of days in the belly of a big ass snake, or starving to death over the course of a coupel of weeks because your owner doesn’t want you anymore and dumps you in an already overpopulated cat dumping park. Shit, I look at the way most people die and I prey that I will only suffer for about seventeen minutes.
Yes its sick, and yes i am glad its not leagal, but its not gonna keep me up tonight either. Medicine is a valid circumstance for the taking of animal life, but not cosmetics? Self defense but not food? Commuter convenience but not art? I think we all should pause and look at the suffering that our lifestyles necessitate before we become so righteous about the atrocity here.
Chris J
Now I wish I had heeded the warning in the thread title and I could have done to bed blissfully unaware of these twits. They say they tortured the cat to “comment on the death and suffering of animals used for meat”? What a load of crap. They may have been using animal advocacy to deflect some criticism, but this was completely 100% about trying to make a name for themselves, by doing something new and “cutting-edge”. It was simply about what every performance artist strives for: doing something that hasn’t been done before.
No doubt they knew that the bourgeois “wouldn’t understand”, but at least they would be heroes and martyrs in their own elite art circles where they’ll be applauded for challenging the trite standards of decency under which most of us live. Ugh, these guys make me sick.
I just hope the judge throws the book at them, and isn’t fooled by the art or animal advocacy angle. If Andrew Burnett gets three years for killing a dog in a rage, these dolts deserve far more, simply because of the premeditation and the callousness involved.
I guarantee you it’s a hoax. There is a constant stream of these stupid art hoaxes. Just a couple of months ago, there was a big flap about a Chinese performance artist who had photos taken while he ate a human fetus. Except it was a HOAX.
Let me give you a better example. A group of English art students recently won a grant to produce artworks that dealt with british leisure activities. So the artists spent the money on a luxury vacation for the whole group. Press releases with photos showing the artists on the beach, frolicking in the sun, and writing manifestoes about the gullibility of the arts grants organization made headlines in all the papers. Then someone decides to check it out to see if it’s true. They check the photos, the are all revealed as immaculate forgeries, someone went to lots of trouble to make them look real. The money, it turns out, was spent on precisely what they said: an artwork about people’s attitudes towards leisure including photographs and texts. Except this artwork was executed in the press. Nobody actually went on vacation, they hoaxed the press into a huge embarassing set of stories about the waste of grant money. But the artists were more clever than anyone else, they got publicity they wanted, as well as some mass-media inspired introspection about how we ALL waste our money on vacations.
SO I’ll guarantee you the film is a hoax. It doesn’t exist, nobody’s seen it and nobody ever will because it doesn’t exist. The art students (if they actually exist) didn’t have to make any video because just the IDEA of the video got them the results they wanted.
May I have your permission to forward this information off of the board? I have already sent the forwarded the article linked above to the Fanciers list - by this evening there should be about a thousand outraged cat lovers ready to rip people apart with their bare hands. I would like to also provide this information as a partial target for their wrath.
If anyone can provide me with the information necessary to contact the legal officials (not sure who that would be in Canada) involved in this case, I would appreciate that also.
It would not be the first time we have helped to provide ‘impetus’ to the investigation and punishment of animal abusers 
I guess I should have expected that on a Board this large we would find a few apologists for this sort of thing.
Basically - these people who did this have dehumanized themselves by their own hand. They have forfeited their right to be treated as sane, rational, valuable members of society. They are human scum. Left to their own devices, I have no doubt that they will move on to filming a gang-rape of a child, and under Stoid’s liberal definition calling it “art”. Shit, they probably would get NEA funding for it too. And we could expect the same typical crowd of Celebrity Scum (Striesand, Springstein, Redford, Carville) to do the circuits on talk shows, saying how “dangerous” it is to limit the “artistic expression” of 2 twenty-something monsters. :rolleyes:
And I’m still not saying what I would do to them.
You know, every now and then I pine for justice the old-fashioned way. Forget the lawsuits, the never-ending dialogue about what defines “art.” Someone needs to take these two sadists to a quarry outside of town and beat the living shit out of them.
You guarantee?
Does that mean I get my money back if you’re wrong? BTW, a case very similar to this actually happened at my school a few years ago, and it sure as heck wasn’t a hoax (many people saw it with their own eye–it wasn’t a video). Unfortunately, the miserable little fuck was never caught. So obviously this thing can never happen, right?
And I’m sure the Canadian government is prosecuting for no reason, and with no evidence.
Now go cock off somewhere else.
And I tend to come down on the side that you and cat-tourturing buddies are acting like one collective giant human penis.
You guarantee?
Does that mean I get my money back if you’re wrong? BTW, a case very similar to this actually happened at my school a few years ago, and it sure as heck wasn’t a hoax (many people saw it with their own eye–it wasn’t a video). Unfortunately, the miserable little fuck was never caught. So obviously this thing can never happen, right?
And I’m sure the Canadian government is prosecuting for no reason, and with no evidence.
Now go cock off somewhere else.
And I tend to come down on the side that you and cat-tourturing buddies are acting like one collective giant human penis.
First things first: Art is not art because the artist says so, it is art because the audience says so. The declarations of these pseudo-intellectual po-mo nitwits that they are creating important, provocative works will one day be revealed as the clothesless emperors that they are.
Now, Chas E., you sure seem sure of yourself, huh? I guess you’ve never heard of Teemu Maki, who filmed himself killing a cat in 1990 as a performance art piece (after which he masturbated on its corpse). Or Imad Issa, who tore apart a live dove. Or Kim Jones, who burned rats alive for art. Or Joe Coleman, who has bit the heads off of live rats in performance. Or Jan Fabre, whose troup stomped frogs to death on stage.
Your guarantee is, I’m afraid, worthless. Sadly, this probably is not the worst thing ever done to a living animal in the name of “art.”
Assuming it isn’t a hoax, because the principle applies either way:
What’s the big deal as to whether it is labeled as “art” or not? Last time I looked, art != good.
The two gallery owners both said that they abhored it and that it isn’t morally acceptable. So what’s your problem with them? The fact that they may or may not want to assign a meaningless linguistic label to it is really not relevant. They’ve condemned the piece! They just refuse to say that it can’t be called art.
I can understand getting worked up over the “artists” - I shake with rage at them myself - but I fail to see why you’d get so worked up at some people who agree with you but just assign it a label with which you don’t agree.
pan