A Panel of Scholars Raises Concerns on What to do About “Hurtful” Art
LOS ANGELES—More than a decade ago, the artist Marco Evaristti explored the “killing aesthetic” by letting art gallery visitors in Amsterdam pulverize a goldfish swimming in a blender. Legal protest ensued, and the Dutch courts ruled that the means of killing the fish was instant and humane, while the efforts of animal rights groups to steal (or "rescue") the fish were a violation of property law.
This is just one of the ethical dilemmas explored at a recent College Art Association (CAA) panel, where art leaders stated their concern about artists using “degradation” of human beings and “physical hurt” to animals as part of their art.
The dilemma has got even the CAA's head office over a barrel. Its semi-official statement on animal abuse in art said that the CAA opposes animal cruelty, but also opposes all forms of censorship. As an unofficial CAA panel of scholars here in L.A. suggested, artists have a hard time policing each other when controversies arise. Meanwhile, the public has grown increasingly contemptuous of artists who use fish, sharks, pigs, horses, dogs, and birds—or fake bloody corpses at gala fund-raising parties—as fodder for seemingly hurtful artworks.
Gerald Silk, chair of art history at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, convened the “Beyond Censorship” panel at the annual CAA convention, which brought 4,000 art educators to the Los Angeles Convention Center. The panel seemed to suggest that many artists today are going too far. The dilemma is what to do about it, since all professions try to keep standards. Do artists claim to have special “privileges” that society does not give to other people? Silk asked. “Some of the material today may be disquieting,” he said, opening the panel session.
The well-known story of Evaristti’s goldfish art, titled Helena, was among the most complex case studies. “Helena is far more complex than deciding to push a [blender] button,” said Jonathan Wallis of Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia, who analyzed differences between "moral" law and legal statutes.
Other animal-related works of art were no less difficult. One Latin American artist made videos of horses being slaughtered. Two other Latino artists employed a seemingly starving dog tied to a gallery wall or a hawk meeting its apparent demise in large conceptual art cage. Later, the artists explained that the dog was actually fed, and likewise for the bird. Nevertheless, in both cases, protest arose. Police closed the hawk exhibit and a global Internet “rumor” spread that the dog starved in the gallery.
The distorting effect of Internet information, or that of “social media,” has become a serious new issue for artists today, said Donna Moran of Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. With the Internet, a global protest about a “starving” dog can develop overnight. Also, the uncouth work of young artists may haunt them forever, even after they repent. The case in point is Tom Otterness, a successful sculptor, who is now being haunted by his 1977 Shot Dog Film, in which as an “angry” young artists he indeed shot his dog on video. Last year, the Internet revival of his past deeds led to the cancellation of a major art commission, and his future looks bleak.
Moran of Pratt also said that young artists have quickly learned to manipulate the Internet to gain attention. They might introduce offensive art in order to raise protest, after which they claim censorship, sending that message around the Internet to rally news coverage and an unimaginably large mass of Internet supporters. This puts significant pressure on art institutions, far more than a single artist can do.
Another panelist, Joe Zammit-Lucia, said the problem goes beyond the Internet to the corruption of contemporary art culture itself. The art culture seems to reward deviant behavior, said Zammit-Lucia, an artist, businessman, and advocate for animal humaneness. He cited a typical trick of the artist: do something offensive, provoke protest, and then call protestors hypocrites because society itself is worse than the art. This has led to two rigid sides. One side says anything goes in art, the other says that society puts limits on everyone, and that should include artists.
Zammit-Lucia traced that new egregious art to modernism’s avowed anti-humanism, and also to postmodern “conceptual art,” which privileges extreme ideas over normal human feelings. As a result, today there is a breed of artists who specialize in “dehumanized” art, knowing that sensation sells, he said. These artists also know they can gain “moral cover” from the art world when society protests. Added to this, Zammit-Lucia said, is a distorted reward system: art education is ambivalent about dehumanized art, critics write cheerful reviews about it, and savvy curators show it to publicize their galleries and sell it to collectors. This is a “self-feeding cycle of morally questionable behavior,” Zammit-Lucia said. “We need a way to break the cycle.”
He suggests that the art world, while not endorsing censorship, revive an age-old form of self-regulation, which is to ostracize offending artists. This would involve stating moral objection to artists who abuse their “privileges.” This is the old fashioned shaming of bad behavior. The public is already doing this.
Here’s the rub, though. It will be much harder to ask millionaire collectors and wealthy art foundations to stop funding or buying such art, since they are guided by publicity-driven curators who endorse it. And it will only grow on the Internet, giving fame to some, while destroying the reputation of others.
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