Art Project Under Fire

I saw this article and thought it was pretty interesting.

The premise is essentially that this art student at the University of Maine placed hundreds of American Flags in an almost maze-like pattern on the ground of the schools Student Center and videotaped to see if her classmates would step on the flags. She reports that about 95% of the people did not step on the flags.

The article discusses the girls art project, but also discusses the uprising that it caused, with Vietnam veterans protesting the project.

Here is a video, I understand that it is a home movie and not from any reputable news sources, but he shares a lot of facts that are interesting and generally presents the side of the case that would be against this art project. He argues that this girl, Susan Crane, desecrated the American flag, which is strictly against the Constitution.


Now I support Susan Cranes First Amendment right to free speech, as well as the rights of the protesters, but I think that a much bigger deal has been made out of this, than should really have occurred. The point of this art piece was to see the reaction of her fellow students, to see if they would desecrate the flag by walking on it.

Although this reminds me of another "Art" Project that has received a lot of media backlash, I apologize for this aside from politics for just one moment. Please bear with me.

This article goes into much better detail, and I believe at this point just about everyone in the wired world has received some sort of email or notification about this.
Here is a link by the artist to pictures of the show, his blog is titled "The Little Dog Lives". Cute. [DISCLAIMER: Contains images of Animal Cruelty. That means mom, don't click. It won't make you happy.]

The gist of the issue is that this man, Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, got a stray dog, chained it up in a gallery in Costa Rica, where it supposedly starved to death. On a wall, written in dog food was the phrase "eres lo que lees", which translates to "you are what you read".

The artist has said:

"The name of the dog was Natividad (which means Birth), and I let him die of hunger in the sight of everyone, as if the death of a poor dog was a shameless media show in which nobody does anything but to applaud or to watch disturbed. In the place that the dog was exposed remain a metal cable and a cord. The dog was extremely ill and did not want to eat, so in natural surroundings it would have died anyway; thus they are all poor stray dogs: sooner or later they die or are killed."

I guess he's taken the big elephant in the room and turned it into a starving, chained-up, street dog. I should also point out that the artist has also claimed that the dog escaped and did not actually die in the museum. So the ultimate fate of the dog is a bit disputed, but either way, this was a clear animal rights violation, no?

There has been a big outcry recently about this, including a petition Boycotting the Artist from showing the same piece again in Honduras. (I assume this would mean another dog would fall victim to the art show).

Artists are always trying to be daring and different, but when the artist begins to break laws, those that are codified, and those that are just deemed "natural rights", that is when the public takes issue. Both of these projects beg the question, How far is too far, for the sake of art?