Saturday, December 15, 2007

Artist or A-hole?

Recently, an OCAD student turned in a final project whose content was a fictitious bombing of the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) in Toronto. The project consisted of this YouTube video ... and an mock "bomb"* placed in front of the museum. You may guess the outcome:
  1. Several downtown streets closed for hours at the height of rush hour.
  2. A major fundraising event being held at the ROM cancelled.
  3. The student's expulsion from the school, and subsequent criminal charges.
  4. A long debate about the limits of conceptual art.
Responses ranged from a fellow student's defense of this exercise as a valid exercise in conceptual art ("it's a statement on our culture of fear") to wide-ranging criticisms of conceptual art itself. There was a nice article in the Toronto NOW magazine (for once) that pointed out the real problem with this art project: not that it was in bad taste, or amateurish, or "not really art", but that it involves people who didn't ask to be involved. How many of the evacuated staff and guests of the museum were at least a little worried about this threat? How many members of the bomb squad swallowed a lump in the throat as they brought their equipment to the scene? I wanted to pass along the closing bon mot in the article that I thought summed up the debate perfectly:
You can piss on a canvas and call it art if you want - just don't piss on me!

* The student later said that he "didn't expect such an overreaction", and in his defence, the "bomb" apparently had a sign on the side saying "this is not a bomb". However, it was very carefully built to *look* like a bomb. It's not clear if he made any actual bomb threats to the police.

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