Where’s the miserable bastards from PETA now?

A Costa Rican artist found himself in hot water with the animal protection people in his home country after using a starving, sick street dog as part of an exposition in Managua, Nicaragua, in August. Guillermo “Habacuc” Vargas allegedly found the dog tied up on a street corner in a poor Nicaragua barrio and brought it to the showing.

He tied the dog, according to furious animal lovers, in a corner of the salon where it died after a day. Habacuc’s exhibition included a legend spelled out in dog food reading “You are what you read,” photos and an incense burner that burned an ounce of marijauna and 175 “rock’ of crack cocaine. In the background, according to reports, the Sandista national anthem played backwards.

According to the artist, his “art” was a tribute to Natividad Canda, a Nicaraguan burglar killed in Costa Rica by two rottweilers guarding property he had entered at night. The incident caused friction between the two countries. Habacuc told the daily La Nacion, “I won’t say the dog died. The importance to me is the hypocracy of the people where an animal is the focus of attention where people come to see art but not when it’s in the street starving to death.”

“The same thing happened with poor Natividad Canda. The people sympathized with him only after he was dead,” the artist added.

The artist apparently is unaware that at least three large, active organizations are dedicated in Costa Rica to the protection of animals and that several persons have been prosecuted for cruelty to animals. They are hampered in their efforts by the old Hispanic customs of disregard for animal welfare and by a lack of funding.

Modern art is a blight on humanity, and cases like this prove that today’s “artists” are little more than hacks who sell pretentious politically themed garbage to intellectually deficient people with too much money and not enough class to keep themselves out of trouble. I hope this “artist” dies in a gutter, where his works belong.

I’ve always been partial to Art Nouveau myself no doubt because of my fondness for Romanticism. But I rarely get to point to so clear an example of the vileness of modern “art” and why I can hardly bring myself to attend gallery openings anymore. Awful.

Though there are some rather good artists plying their trade these days, though no artist is officially acknowledge by the elitist modern art world unless they fill a glass with urine and make a chocolate penis for a life sized Jesus. The confrontational aspect of modern art has completely overtaken the love of beauty and expression of the sublime that is the heart and soul of Art.

the fashion stills of Alix Malta come to mind, I find them quite provocative and beautiful despite their commercialism. The paintings of Stephanie Alice Rogers or the high tech Gothic symbolism of Erland Mork seem to me more worthy of study by art critics than dog torture.

But the dog killing artist will be lauded for his “bravery” in transgressing the boundaries of morality through art, even though he simply created a living torture porn exhibit that owes more to Hostel than to any real artistic feeling. He will ultimately be rewarded, while we’re punished with a lifetime of hideousness passed off as art.

h/t Moonbattery