"Art" or abuse?
 

Cruelty if you ask me.



Guillermo Habacuc Vargas had 2 children catch this dog. He paid the kids for this. He then chained the dog and used the dog as “art”. He told everyone not to feed this dog. The dog died in the gallery. He calls himself an artist. I call him an animal abuser. In that event, (in which the dog died) he was chosen to represent his country in the “Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008?.
October 18th, 2007 | by Ginnie

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jesus christ.
WHAT THE FUCK
he killed a dog?
WHY THE FUCK WOULD SOMEONE KILL A FUCKING DOG?!?!?!?!
he should be arrested and put on display and the guards shouldnt let anyone feed him till he dies in a pile of his own feces after he is forced to eat them, for not having any other form of nutrition
FUCK

that's fucking sick.

it's interesting that apparently nobody cared his "incense burner that burned an ounce of marijauna and 175 “rock’ of crack cocaine" though.

super.

Speaking as someone who has voluntarily seen and enjoyed two Costes performances, I'm gonna go ahead and say this is not art.
French people peeing on each other and running through the audience naked; now that is art.

These goldfish on the other hand, didn't feel anything... :rolleyes:
2003^

This man's not an artist, now he should chain himself and die in a gallery, he'd see what his "art" is about

chaining the dog is one thing... may make the dog sad, but starving it to death is cruel and reprehensible. that being said, i don't agree at all with the idea that it then ceases to be art. it irritates me quite a lot when i hear people say "my four year old could do that, that's not art." that might make it bad art, but art none the less. the piece shown above is cruel and disgusting art that should not be afforded any of the tolerance given to something like peeing on each other or on a crucifix. but it is still art.

who knew?

you sick fuck.

I stood in the back, for what it's worth.

so, you stood behind people while they peed.

all that business about being "a stall man" was nothing more than a poorly disguised excuse.

zip 'em up boys, we got a PEE WATCHER.

People in public bathrooms don't usually CHARGE ADMISSION.

i never said amything about whether its art or not, cause i dont really care if it is art or not. it very well may be art, but its sick. and shitty art. and he should still chain himself to a gallery and starve to death.
he still is a sick fuck, art or not

do you think that yr making a better case for yrself by stating that you PAY people so that you can watch them pee?

minnesotans and their bathroom habbits man.

I think that this thread really proves, that just because you call it "art" doesn't mean that it's not something else.

fucking SICK!

not shocking. :rolleyes:

i never said you said anything about whether it is art or not... it was simply the subtext of the original question: "art" or abuse? which implies that they are mutually exclusive.

...so why get defensive? we agree it is sick and shitty art. i was simply making a point about the way these things are always debated. and stating my belief that saying something is not art, when it clearly is (i.e. was done by an artist and shown in a gallery) is not only a useless semantic gesture, but fails to address what is ACTUALLY wrong with the artwork in question.

my point exactly.

this is horrible!!!

We as a western culture find it cruel, but in other countries they starve dogs in confined cages and then beat them to death before dining on their flesh. It apparently makes the meat taste better.

At least they don't call it art.

Some people can be too postmodern for their own good. Irony is easy, cruelty is still cruel.

i wasnt getting defensive-all is cool:cool:
and pbradley basically summed it up quite well

Same thing they do to cows etc. before they slaughter them so people can eat them.
Terrible, terrible.

abhorrent

This is sad.

abuse!!! poor fucking dog should have been fed by the artist(fucking Asshole)

Besides the asshole self proclamed (for this particular "piece", dunno the rest of his "production") artist, what the hell the exhibition's curators were thinking when they decided to call/accept him and his idea?? Free advertisement? Fuckers.
Yep toko, that goldfish+blender thing came to my mind too (second time this week, first for that thread where can't-remember-his-username-right-now said he put a fish in a (broken) blender, now this.
Even that is cruel to an extent, but staying there watching a dog die is pretty different imo.

here too. now you go to jail for cruelty towards animals, till a few years ago you just had to pay a fine.

I think it's easy to over react to this kind of thing.

How do you suggest that people react?

They should chain that piece of shit up the same way and starve him too
Fucker

Original point - kill the cunt.

Secondary point - There is such a thing as stall etiquette, sweeties.

Just when people were coming out of the stone age.

I think sometimes there is a strong case for committing the same act against the criminal as they committed against others

Yeah, but if the criminal survives the act, then is he absolved of the crime?

isn't that a little old testament? besides - where are you going to find someone willing, for the sake of justice, to stick his cock in this man's corpse and then eat part of his brain:

And some crime, I'm sorry to say, in cases like Dahmer's above, seem to be possible only in a society like America's, or in a society that has been cultivated or brought about by America. Which is to say, society in general, the world over, because America is the new Britain. Dahmer is an extension of the society, an appendage growing unnaturally, but inevitably, an outpuring of a system that destroys whole nations for profit, applauds the victor and sacrifices the miserable... People like Dahmer are a tumour in the brainstem of a corrupted, twisted society that revels in the sheen and superficiality of its Britneys and Lindsays... A diseased society with makeup and glitter, jewels of blood and acid tears... Crime becomes an escape for the destitue and the depraved, and help is rarely a reality, only existing in glossy daytime serials so far removed from reality that the cringeworthy becomes the crucible... The whining and searing cries of the children become song and dance for the spoilt and the fashionably wringed, their little hooks and claws caught in the web of global credit and finance... This is the same society that moved the Indians out of the Amazon and displaced the Natives of almost every land in the world... They are crying and the only voice they have is that of televaneglism... This is the product of society, this is your product.

saw costes once? what possessed you to go a second time?
kidding, wish i didnt miss him when he came this year.

anyway, i would consider this art - not nessisarily good art, and most definitly sick and disturbed but still art.

"art" or abuse? "art" and abuse, abuse as art.
im surprised the gallery didnt step in and actually allowed this to happen

From Dictionary.com:

1.the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance. 2.the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria; works of art collectively, as paintings, sculptures, or drawings: a museum of art; an art collection. 3.a field, genre, or category of art: Dance is an art. 4.the fine arts collectively, often excluding architecture: art and architecture. 5.any field using the skills or techniques of art: advertising art; industrial art. 6.(in printed matter) illustrative or decorative material: Is there any art with the copy for this story? 7.the principles or methods governing any craft or branch of learning: the art of baking; the art of selling. 8.the craft or trade using these principles or methods. 9.skill in conducting any human activity: a master at the art of conversation. 10.a branch of learning or university study, esp. one of the fine arts or the humanities, as music, philosophy, or literature. 11.arts, a.(used with a singular verb

 

) the humanities: a college of arts and sciences. b.(used with a plural verb

 

) liberal arts. 12.skilled workmanship, execution, or agency, as distinguished from nature. 13.trickery; cunning: glib and devious art. 14.studied action; artificiality in behavior. 15.an artifice or artful device: the innumerable arts and wiles of politics. 16.Archaic. science, learning, or scholarship.

Horribly starving an animal to death is none of those things. It saddens me to think this guy could be praised for this.

you're confusing ethics and aesthetics. there is nothing in any of those definitions that indicates art must be ethical.

to use a less emotionally loaded example: all black oil paint is made from animal bone. this may or may not be ethically wrong, but is irrelevant to the aesthetics of painting. whether a painting that uses black paint is art in the first place is just an absurd question.

as for whether starving a dog in a gallery installation is art, it's frankly just as absurd a question, regardless of how ethically wrong it is. saying that killing a dog in an art exhibit is not art is like saying that testing cosmetics on animals is not testing cosmetics. it's a product of sloppy thinking, and as i said before, fails to address what is wrong with killing a dog in favor of stripping it of some symbolic label. this has the result of making you feel better, but that's about it.

Fucking loser. I'm not the violent type, but I'd happily punch this guy in the fucking face.

As to whether it is art or not: No. It's not art. Some people use the word art to get themselves in and out of many things. It's lost all its meaning, it seems. To call the abuse of a dog, art, would be to call what happened on 9/11, for example, art. It's just sick. Everything is labeled art these days, you walking through the doors of an art gallery is art. Stupid and pathetic.

.... now that we've established that some people think it's abuse, and some people think it's both art and abuse, and nobody thinks it's just art.... what do you guys think of the artist saying:

"The importance to me is the hypocracy of the people where an animal is the focus of attention where people come to see art but not when it’s in the street starving to death."

he's essentially calling all of us hypocrites for caring more about that one dog that died in the gallery, than about all the other dogs that die the same way around the corner or down the street from the gallery.