We love controversy. Now it's this: Paris-based North African artist Adel Abdessemed kills medium-sized (but--significantly--nonaggressive) animals in front of a camera for display in an installation at the San Francisco Art Institute. It's called "Don't Trust Me."

There are many reasons for me to object to this work--mostly because I react badly to ham-fisted shock art--but the ethical objections around treatment of animals say much more about us and our own squeamishness around the violence we create than they say about the art or the artist. There is no objection I can mount that doesn't contradict some other action I have already taken or failed to take: I just had bacon for breakfast...again. That bacon didn't grown on a tree. Also, butterfly taxidermy, natural history museum displays, and snakeskin purses--dead carcasses all--don't offend me. Third, according to the gallery's description, these animals are killed far more quickly and painlessly than your average burger-to-be in a slaughterhouse. And I don't write angry letters to The Sportsman Channel for doing what they do. (And my guess is most people reading this haven't done so either.) They show animals being killed all the time. Watch some of those videos; you know where they're headed. It's only the fact that Abdessemed's videos are in a gallery and being called "art" that offends. How Victorian of us. Death is all around us, but when it's stripped of ceremony and pomp, when the curtain is lifted then it offends.

This is about us, not about the art.

Ironically, the fact that it's in a gallery being called art is the only thing that redeems it for me. If the current display at SFAI offends you, floss your brain with this: what happens when these videos end up on Youtube, which they inevitably will if they follow the arc of so many contemporary images? Do they become any different from Soldiers killing dogs? What happens when someone remixes it to a Motorhead or Slim Thug song? Will curator Hou Hanrou still claim that it's art? Is the artist responsible for the entire life cycle of the images s/he creates?

The problem for me is that Abdessemed is just not a very good video maker. That offends me mightily. Big caveat: I haven't seen "Don't Trust Me", but I've seen others of his videos. (Some of his installation work actually seems very compelling, but I've only seen it online in reproduction.)

Why does this remind me of "Snow White and the Madness of Truth" from a few years back? Another mediocre piece of art that misses the mark on whatever it's trying to communicate but nevertheless unleashes collective outrage based mostly on the outraged being too repelled by it to spend enough time with it to actually interpret it. The truth is the liberal left (of which I am a card carrying member) hates to have its cherished idols skewered just as much as the right does. Big-eyed animals. Suffering poor people. And we frequently react with the same automated demand to Shut It Down that's more frequently attributed to the anti-intellectual and anti-curiosity forces of the right.

I don't know what this exhibition means for the State of Art and the State of Humanity. Personally, I'm taking a break from making grand predictive pronouncements. I do know that the video exists, that I underestimated it at first (dismissed it as too easy, too academic, too boring), and later came to appreciate its power (it truly has sparked conversation in a way that little else has done in recent months), but based on the description and the artist's other videos it's pretty likely to be badly made art.

I also know that humans love big fuzzy things, the charismatic macrofauna. And so we attempt to imbue those things with human traits like "personality" and "innocence." But even the urge to kill for sport is not limited to humans. Watch a cat play with a roach and then leave its mangled corpse behind when it gets bored. Some animals will kill for pride, for mating. Hell, if it's able, an animal will kill you in a heartbeat just for irony.

Welcome back Mr. Hicks,

Here's a related story, with a petition:
Regina Hackett: The Dubious Art of Torture

Hey you! Thanks for posting and thanks for the link. What, pray tell, is the meaning of this from your comments section, dude: "Sorry for the delayed response. I’m working on weening myself from the blogging."?

Now, when you've rocketed to fame??!

Stop that now, you're making me blush.
Fame? I doubt it. I thought I was just making friends.

Truth be told, I need some time to clear my head and take care of some business offline. I'm still around, though.