Becoming the Monster – The Weird Side of the Internet

Becoming the Monster – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Art, if it doesn’t challenge the purvayor, could be considered indistinguishable from craft or decoration. Art has a power beyond aesthetic, a duty beyond pleasure and joy. We don’t like to think about this. We want musicians to just play music and writers to just write whodunits or suburban horror, but for art to truly resonate, it has to challenge, and to challenge, it has to make us uncomfortable sometimes. And to do that, it’s always going to risk crossing the line.

In my opinion, Chilean-born Danish artist Marco Evaristti crossed the line with a recent project, called “Now You Care.” The work was simple, but pretty shocking: three piglets in a cage made up of bits of shopping carts. The pigs were denied food and water, and the point of the exhibit was for the public to watch the pigs starve to death.

I understand what he was getting at, and I’m sure you do too. We don’t care when it’s bacon in a plastic wrapper in our refrigerators, but when we have to watch the piglets starve – which is a frequent occurrence in industrial pig farms, I guess – then we care. And as such a message is what he is aiming for, his work is remarkably effective, because he’s getting hate-mail, many believe rightfully so. I’m not saying I would throw him hate-mail, but that may be because I don’t have his address. This is clearly disgusting, cruel, and too far. And his friend helped animal rights activists break in to the place they were showing it and steal the pigs, so yeah, they’re fine.

Ultimately, Evaristti was okay with the theft. He was just trying to make a point about our willingness to eat meat when we don’t see what goes on behind the scenes. But there was a saying by Nietzsche, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” I think that this is really the applicable quote.

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