Art is meant to be challenging, to break down social mores one stroke at a time. It helped Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon depicting 5 prostitutes go "old-school viral" for being too lude and grotesque; and pushed viewers of Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" photograph into a hate-fueled rage so much so two someones attacked it with a hammer.
Yet museums and galleries have always welcomed that kind of attention. It's one of the few important reasons art exists, after all. Though one art collective seemingly went too far when they built two houses out of shipping containers and positioned them to be fucking … doggy-style.
The Louvre didn't think it was so cute.
As the New York Times reports, “Domestikator” by the collective Atelier van Lieshout was scheduled to open to the public on October 19 of this year. After the public weighed in on it, however, the Louvre has decided to yank it from exhibition.
“Online commentaries point out this work has a brutal aspect,” said the Louvre’s director, Jean-Luc Martinez in a letter to the collective. “It risks being misunderstood by visitors to the gardens.”
The creators, of course, don't see it that way.
“This is something that should not happen,” Joep van Lieshout, the collective’s founder, told the NYT. “A museum should be an open place for communication. The task of the museum and the press is to explain the work.”
“The piece itself, it’s not really very explicit,” van Lieshout added. “It’s a very abstracted shape. There are no genitals; it’s pretty innocent.”
Another option for van Lieshout and his team? Find an objectophile (a person who falls in love with objects) and play match-maker. One never truly knows when love will strike next. …
Leave a Reply