Filmmaker Gets 4 Years for Grossing Out Jurors

[rrneck]

13. From the movie First Monday in October (1981)

How do you tell the difference between really bad porn and really good art? I recall a performance artist who bathed in pig offal. And another who did "paint enemas". And of course there's Vito Acconci's Seedbed.

In the piece, there is a low wooden ramp merging with the floor. The ramp extends across the width of the room, beginning two feet up the side of one wall and slanting down to the middle of the floor.

In his original performance of the piece, Acconci lay hidden underneath the ramp installed at the Sonnabend Gallery, masturbating. The artist's spoken fantasies about the visitors walking above him were heard through loudspeakers in the gallery.

Performance artists are so out there.

This guy? I hope there aren't enough people in the world who would get off on the crap he produced to be able to call it porn. Then again there might. If you add to them the number of people who would look at just plain old shock content to be able to say they had seen it, maybe it was a money making proposition. Was it art? I don't think he intended it to be so. I don't think the jury thought so either.

One of the most famous tropes in art school is "where are you going with this?" In the trial of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnatti's exhibition of the Mapplethorpe exhibit the jury could see the artist was going somewhere worthwhile, which is to say he was going for a deeper insight into the human condition. This Isaacs asshole was just going to the bank.