Art Critic Of The Week (11)

Chilean-born artist, Marco Evaristti, opened an exhibition recently in Copenhagen entitled And Now You Care, designed, he says, to raise awareness of the suffering caused to animals by mass meat production. A centrepiece was an “installation” consisting of three piglets, Lucia, Simon, and Benjamin, in a makeshift cage made from shopping trolleys.

Not to everyone’s taste and might stretch the boundaries of people’s perception of what art is but the real rub was that it was the artist’s intention to deprive the piglets of food and water so that they would eventually starve to death. His point allegedly was that modern breeding techniques often produce litters of twenty and with only fourteen teats the sow would not be able to feed them all and some of the piglets would be lost along the way.

However, Evaristti’s friend, Caspar Stefferson, prompted by his ten-year old daughter’s pleas to save the pigs, let a group of animal rights activists into the gallery and they promptly removed the installation.

Evaristti rang the police to report the theft but after a few hours of reflection, while ruing the treachery of his friend, concluded that the animals deserved a happy life. The exhibition, now minus its star attraction, has closed down.

The artist is not done yet and is looking to revive the exhibition, using the corpses of piglets that have died of starvation acquired from meat processing plants and filling a transparent refrigerator to the gunwales with their bodies. He has the refrigerator which is a start, I suppose.

I will look out for what he does next with horrified interest. Modern art, eh?