In an editorial titled Death for No Reason, a writer for the website says,

The argument has been made that these kinds of exhibit are justified if they challenge our sensibilities or confront our social, political and cultural norms. This is undoubtedly true and is sometimes valid. There is a case for shocking people so that an artist can intercede a new slant on some situation, directly or obliquely. But this can be done, and has been done, very effectively and many times, without having to kill anything anew. There is plenty of death out there to work with.

Only Abdessemed backs off the killings by saying that they ‘were to happen anyway’ and that he could not have prevented them. Hmmm, are we supposed to swallow the story that some farmer routinely slaughters an peculiarly odd mix of animals by sledgehammer? (Abdessemed ‘chose’ the six – a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe – from a wider number of animals – is this some sadistic ark?). This is guff.

Think how many blows would it take to kill a horse or an Ox? Even a goat would need several direct smashes on the skull to kill it. Abdessemed doesn’t claim to be exposing any cruelty that might be worthy of art, instead the press release from the San Francisco Art Institute in sickly prose declares that “the multiplicity of stimuli imbue the work with an instantaneous efficiency that circumvents categorization, making typical moral and cultural constraints seem beside the point.”

Beside what point? Not ‘social, cultural, moral, [or] political implications’ the blurb states, no… because “such questions [are] now verging on irrelevance”; oh really?

Better then to quote Morrissey of The Smiths, “It’s death for no reason and death for no reason is murder”.

Looking at this critically and realising what’s wrong here doesn’t require extreme animal rights activism or vegan sensibility. It’s the selfishness.

Even hopped on Vicodin, it’s obvious to me that you have no fucking clue what you’re talking about. The bullshit emanating from your mouth is palpable. No one said that the SFAI killed any animals for the exhibit – just that they’re promoting animal abuse by sponsoring it. If students and faculty are being threatened, certainly I deplore that (most obviously because they have little-to-nothing to actually do with the exhibit), but all the action alerts and press releases I’ve seen from AR orgs have encouraged people to protest, not threaten violence. Which, despite AETA, is well within our rights.

As for the war in Iraq, nice touch – it shows you for what you really are, a concern troll. Violence is violence, no matter the victim and perpetrator. Compassion isn’t an finite pie that we have to dole out in careful pieces lest we waste it; we can care about the animals exploited by Abdessemed, as well as the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and soldiers murdered by Bush. A “worse” wrong somewhere else does not make this right.

Oh, and the ranking of “wrongs” – also bullshit.

The exhibit did not involve SFAI killing any animals- in fact, it shows and attempts to shock people into considering the senseless brutality against animals by a Mexican slaughterhouse. You think this would be right up PETA’s alley, but instead, many “animals lovers” have been so moved by what they think they know about this that the college is having to fend off threats against tehir faculty and students. I told a relative who is a student there that if she so much as had her little finger hurt by the acts of an “animal lover”, I’d have to do what Morris Dees did to the Klan- sue them into oblivion and bankruptcy. To threaten and harras the school in what outght to be considered an act of terrorism denigrates the animal rights movement, indicating that its advocates are just hairbrained nuts.