Cruelty to animals in art galleries is ok.
About a week ago I saw this blurb in some magazine about an art exhibit that was taken down due to a large outcry of “animal cruelty.” The exhibit, I learned today, involved a handful of animals getting struck and killed with a sledge hammer. PETA was all over this as you can imagine any self-respecting animal rights organization would be, as were many concerned citizens.
Mission accomplished. Sort of…
Adel Abdessemed, Parisian artist’s exhibit: Don’t Trust Me, did something very very few modern artists can do. It got public attention. That’s why the artist’s mission was accomplished. The message is so simple [innocent animals were killed on video] that it could be relayed to thousands almost instantaneously. Petitions were struck all in the name of this handful of animals. Of course, millions of chickens around the world are being slain, dogs are being bred to fight one another, and the other countless acts of injustice to innocent animal’s lives. But that’s just animals.
Really, whether it was Adel’s intention to cause this meta-scandal surrounding his exhibit or not, the implications of these simple videos have driven home the point that Americans love their scandals. Something to distract them that seems outrageous, but ultimately has no bearing or effect on anything, ever. Lewinski, John Edwards, and the slew of Republican man/boy-love incidents. Everyone loves a good scandal, to try and convince ourselves that we’re actually involved in today’s problems, we’re doing something for the good! But doing good is ugly, it’s not profitable and never gets any credit. You want to help animals out? Go pick one off the street and save it. This artist is trying to tell us that, but all the whistle-blowers love their scandals and attention. Is it wrong to kill or abuse one dog in an effort to save thousands?
Look, Adel’s intentions may not have been to surface this examination of the scandal in America by creating one of his own [although I think it's genius] it may have been to just force people to notice the reality of true violence. We live in a world filled with movie FX gore and guts sprinkled with a benign [and lazy] reports of our occupation of Iraq and its many casualties, so it’s not surprising that when we witness real violence, even in video form, we coil in horror. Finally, someone is showing us the reality! You know, the reason many of our troops are going through PSD. I find it ironic, that for how violent this country is, we can’t seem to handle the realities of what occurs every single minute of every single day on a much broader scale. Kind of like some obese blind man sending out his servants to catch and kill orphan children and cut them into cheeseburger form, because he likes the taste, just as long as he doesn’t hear about how it was done. Ok. I took that one a bit far, I apologize. I guess it’s time to call this post done before I go off the deep end again.