reviews, features & interviews
Bioethics at MoMA
By libby
May 9, 2008 · 11 Comments
Oh, dear. A dead mouse coat made from embryonic mouse cells. Was it ever alive? By whose standards? George Bush’s? How would we feel about a human coat made from embryonic human cells? And would we call it alive? and art?
This link from The Art Newspapercame to me from friend Steve Minicola.
I’m really not so worried that the mouse coat was killed prematurely. It does bother me that it got made in the first place, let alone exhibited at MoMA.
It’s one thing to want to protect stem cell research. It’s another to want to promote stem cell art–even embryonic stem cells from mice. The whole point of art is it’s metaphor, not reality.
I suppose that makes me against a whole range of art making. I prefer a picture of dead to dead creatures. (Oh, btw, I confess I find Damien Hirst’s work often disgusting, and certainly ghoulish. I’d just as soon define it as circus freak show prurient).
But just to muddy the waters even further, why are we making art out of dead insects these days (not that I’ve never crushed an ant or swatted a mosquito; but using their dead bodies for art…)? Are these creatures too not a form of life? I say no fully formed creatures for art; and no actual creature parts for art. Art is not the same as a scientific experiment, or research to find cures for real life.
Tags: reviews, features & interviews
Readers Comments (11)
…and congratulations on your honorary doctorate, Libby!!! That’s so exciting. You guys totally deserve it for all you’ve done in/ for the Philly area.
I haven’t seen the piece at MoMA that I forwarded earlier. I just find the intersection of art and science particularly compelling these days.
I gotta disagree with your categorization of Hirst, however. All of his works don’t necessarily resonate with me, but I think he has some interesting things to say about mortality, exhibition practices and our own misguided sense of entitlement in the larger world. I can deal with his dead, rotting tiger sharks and laterally sliced lambs, I just don’t know if I’d want to see the results if he began using life forms as a medium…
That being said, we’ve been using animal and plant parts/ byproducts in art-making practices for centuries, if not millenniums. I can see how work like the MoMA piece increases the cringe factor exponentially, but Piero Manzoni probably killed more cells in his Merda d’artista edition and let’s not even speak of Acconci’s Seedbed…
Give Nutter a pat on the back for me. We all have high hopes for him.
Best,
Steve.
Hi, Steve, thanks for saying all that. While I do think Hirst has some good things to say about mortality (or bad things too), I am not crazy about animals in formaldehyde, sliced to be put on display. It seems disrespectful to me.
To clarify what I was saying, I don’t object to the killing of whatever was there. I do not regard it as life. What I object to is the disrespect toward life in the name of art, tinkering, or just science gone wild. I am not a Right to Lifer. I’m at the other end of the spectrum. If a researcher did this or something similar without running it by an ethics board, the researcher would be in big trouble and for good reason.
After I put up that post, I began to wonder if the article was a hoax. So I checked on MoMA. Well, it should have been a hoax. I’d have gotten a really good laugh out of it!
So if I make drawings of the various casts of deformed babies at the Mutter Museum and sell these drawings to make some money, am I doing something unethical?
How about I create an istallation of a scene in which our new Pope Benedict is crushed by a satellite that fell from orbit?
Are you saying we need ethics in art now? I don’t understand your post and how you feel.
oh yeah libby,
look down further at your own blog when you show a picture of a stuffed cat holding a sign saying “i’m dead”
and remember you are making money off the advertising from your blog aren’t you? so don’t you gain by putting up dead cats pictures on your blog?
Whoa, anonymous 1, all I was talking about was using actual animals in a way that seems nasty. Naturally, my own version of nasty is different from yours. But at some point, I’m just saying I find myself uncomfortable. This would make Damien Hirst happy, I believe. Part of his point is to make me uncomfortable. But I don’t feel I have to like it, just because he has succeeded at making me uncomfortable.
I am not dismissing all his work. I am simply saying I thought the sliced cow in formaldehyde offended me, seemed exposed. You don’t have to agree.
You can make drawings to your heart’s content of anything in the Mutter Museum. 1) It’s a drawing. 2) The stuff is historic science, and though some of it may have been misguided and exploitative at the time, at this point in time those things are artifacts of medical/scientific history, there on display with a different intent.
Same for Benedict–it’s fiction–unless your intent is to threaten him. In that case I would question it. If it’s only to complain about him, I see it as free speech.
I am saying that some art may have questionable ethics and it’s my right to question. This particular project that started all this set my teeth on edge as showing poor judgment. You’re welcome to disagree. I was saying that in research circumstances, this project probably would have raised an ethical red flag. But in art, you do get to make art of whatever you please. There are no ethical limits. Chris Burden can shoot himself. I think it’s a bad idea, but not everyone agrees. I’m just wondering, when we hit the edge of what might or might not be acceptable, how do people consider the ethical implications of their actions.
Are you saying if people want to kill other people for art, it’s ok? That no limits apply?
Anonymous #2, the taxidermy cat did not offend me. It doesn’t feel like a creature exposed. And it’s within a culturally accepted tradition. So it did not set off my ethical buzzer.
I did not go to Body World because it felt questionable to me. My daughter and her fiance went (he’s a medical student) and they thought it was fantastic. Nearly everyone has some point, though, where they might cringe.
As for the advertising, I would have gone to the Carnegie (and have for the past three times) with or without advertising, and yes, you can wonder if anything I write, since we have ads, might be affected by those ads. But the truth is, the amount of money we are talking about is so paltry, why would I bother changing what I write or think for it? No one has made me an offer I can’t refuse, yet. I’m waiting. We could use some real dough. What I do is basically philanthropic, not profit-making. We’re talking chump change. And if you’re talking an hourly wage, the minimum wage is not even on the horizon. We’re working around 3,000 miles below the poverty level.
If you don’t like the taxidermy cat, well then, just say so.
And furthermore, please identify yourself, both of you anonymous people. Just do it in an email, please.
Art that tries to be science always shoots itself in the foot. Whether it’s Damien Hirst or the stem cell mouse coat folks, these artists make things that are idea-driven, and the art is less successful visually than illustrations in a newspaper story about the subject. As for using real animal parts in art, I agree with Libby, it’s just so much P.T. Barnum…and as with the circus some will be amused, some will love it and some will hate it.
Science is fascinating stuff but Scientific American is better at showing the beauty, horror and mystery of the earth and its elements than are the many art projects that purport to do so.
Hi. Good subject. I hear you about corpses, although rendered pig and sometimes horse is in everything, including toothpaste, so why shouldn’t a dead shark show up in art?
But there has to be a line somewhere. I remember in the early ’70s I saw the body of a human being on display in a natural history museum in Paris. Not until recently did such museums reconsider packing display cases with Indian bones.
My mother wore a scapula with a piece of bone from a pope inside, giving me as a child the fearsome image of dead popes carried down to the basement for carving.
Art can use anything as material, and we are free to react. What’s missing is the intelligent, open-minded reaction. Like yours. Thank you. Regina Hackett
I don’t know ….Libby and Roberta, you two sound like you don’t like ideas in art and that it takes away from the visual. I see your point but you are wrong. art should not be separated from science. creative thought is what advances the sciences and sometimes an artist can discover new, interesting and innovative ways to do things. who the heck knows what a mouse coat is for? how the heck knows what the intent of the artist is? one thing is for sure is that you are going to generate your own thoughts and feelings about it whether or not the intent of the artist was something acceptable.
I find your stance against the mouse coat yet accepting the taxidermy cat really confusing. Make up your mind. A dead cat is a dead cat so why don’t you take a stance against it.
If you tow think that the artist should please your visual palette, you got another thing coming. To me that is like turning art into an entertainment medium like television. If you want to champion art that doesn’t tickle the mind but only the eye, you are only hurting art and hurting science.
Art and science go hand in hand. One can feed off the other. Someday this exploration might actually lead to something that might benefit us. who knows.
I am sure alot of people outside of the “arts” admire DaVinci’s explorations. His creative mind shows us what a creative mind is capable of. His intentions were not to make it visually pleasing to us but to understand…to know.
The most exciting things in art happen when innovation occurs. I remember your short take on the arduino boards and what people were doing with them. They are doing some really creative things. The Make people show us what art and science can achieve.
for artists and scientists , their work is not about the final product. it is about the process. and the journey is the destination.
“I’m curious….”
Robert Rauchenberg
Thanks for clarifying, Libby. I’m glad those fancy, new badges haven’t made you “all establishmenty.”
As for the ethical distinctions being considered, I think you raise an interesting point about research standards. At some point, and I’m not quite sure where that line is, bioethics/ research standards will surely come into play if artists are to continue using lifeforms as a medium.
I like to think science and art are inextricably linked, just as I like to think art and everything else is intertwined. To relegate particular subjects to particular publications or institutions (no matter how wonderful they might be) seems misguided, if not dangerous. My impressions of natural science have been informed as much by artists like Karl Blossfeldt, Andy Goldsworthy, James Terrell and Robert Smithson as they have been by popular science writers like Stephen Jay Gould, David Suzuki, David Attenborough or Oliver Sacks. (all men, mostly white, I know, I know…)
I might not have have learned anything from that silly coat, but I’ve thought about and discussed it much more than the other more conventional exhibitions I’ve seen recently. For me art is as much about ideas as it is about precious objects and in that regard I find the work of interest and worthy of inclusion in a gallery setting.
Again, congratulations on your honorary degrees and thanks for providing a local forum for discussions such as this.
Best,
S.
oh, i love this discussion. Regina, thanks for the comment about wearing a scapula. That’s one Roberta will love, ex-Catholic girl that she is!!! It’s a great comparison.
I do agree with Steve on how great it is that the art work stimulated a discussion that might have not happened in a science setting. After all, that is part of what art is about.
I am mostly puzzled by anonymous, however, who seems to think we at artblog don’t like conceptual art. I find myself shocked at being thus misconstrued. Good looks are definitely not enough for either Roberta or me. If a work doesn’t have conceptual underpinnings, it fails in my book, no matter how beautiful it may be. As artists, we sometimes make work so conceptual that the art object practically falls away, or at least disappears from the world and is ephemeral.
And hey, anonymous, the cat is a separate issue. If you don’t like it as a work of art, that’s fine (I loved it!) and that’s your taste. If you think taxidermy is the same level of ethical concern as a live tissue culture that runs amok, you’re missing my ethical point.
If you want to make your own ethical point on the use of animals even in taxidermy, then make it that way. You must divide the issues. Like I said, we are talking about live tissue cultures and tinkering with genetics in art–and is that a chancy sort of thing to be doing when the outcome has potential for disaster, perhaps (maybe it doesn’t, and maybe I don’t understand the work; but having to kill it in the end seems like an ethical issue to me).
On the other hand, I find Steve’s comments convincing on why the work should not be dismissed, even if it’s somewhat discomfiting.