As you may have heard on just about every social networking service and blog out there in the past couple of weeks, some joker named Guillermo Vargas took a dog off the street, tied him to the wall of a museum, and let him starve to death.
As you can imagine, the internets were overjoyed. No, wait, they weren’t! They were angry! The cool-guy blogs were up in arms, and millions signed an internet petition seeking to boycott the artist, or something.
Of course, it turns out that a small detail of this shocking story was falsely reported: The dog didn’t fucking starve to death. In fact, it was fed and given water, only “chained” in the gallery for a duration of three hours, and then let go back into the streets that very day. Zing!
Guillermo Habacuc Vargas intended the work to be a stunt to show how a starving dog suddenly becomes the centre of attention when it is in a gallery, but not when it is on the street. The work was intended to expose people for what they really are – “hyprocritical sheep”. He said that in order for the work to be valid, he and the gallery had to give the impression that the dog was genuinely starving to death and that it died.
Juanita Bermúdez, director of the Codex Gallery, stated that he would not have allowed the dog to be mistreated, that it ate and drank regularly, and that it was allowed to escape back to the streets from where it was taken at the end of the exhibit. “It is conceptual art and a work that leaves a social message”, he said. [care2.com]
Yeah… “hypocritical sheep” sounds pretty good to me. Let me get this straight, thousands of people across the world die of starvation every day but really, fuck that shit, what we need to get outraged about is a hoaxed story about a single dog being chained up and… not getting starved to death? People need to seriously re-think their priorities in life.
Tell you what, if you really want to do something about poor stray animals who are actually getting killed, go down to your local animal shelter and adopt a cat or dog, because an estimated 9.6 million animals are euthanized in the United States every year.
