Art can kill - It did kill a dog, It happened live in Nicaragua.

?Eres lo que lees?. You are what you read. The sentence, written with dog food, was displayed on the white wall of an art gallery. Close to that wall, an abandoned and diseased street dog was left tied to a rope and a wire string. An incense burner was placed nearby where, allegedly, crack and cannabis was burnt during the inauguration. Without food and water, the animal died in the gallery during the next day.
It happened in Nicaragua. It was an ?installation? by artist Guillermo Vargas, known as Habacuc.
The situation, documented with several images, received a lot of attention on the web and originated an online petition against it?s author that gathers, as I write these words, close to 50.000 signatures.

The widespread perplexity for this gesture committed in the name of art launched a fiery discussion about its limits. The question isn?t new. People have been debating what art is since Duchamp signed an urinal and entitled it ?La Fontaine?. The centennial joke seems, however, to have lost its funniness. In the society of cultural relativism the grotesque has become a new critical endeavour. From cows cut in half and conserved in monoliths of fibberglass to diamonds engraved on human skulls, contemporary art production lives hostage to the trends of time. Art has become a place for the execution of function and aesthetic gesture. All is performance.
That art has to submit to all kinds of degradation is a sad consequence of its desperation for visibility. An art acquitted of any design other than the capture of attention. Moralism cloaked as irreverence and critique.

Here is, then, Habacuc, the great moralizer. On his own words, he states that ?the important to me was the hypocrisy of the people: an animal becomes the focus of attention when I put it on a white place where people go see art, not when he?s on the street dying of hunger?. Questioned on the reason why he didn?t use a different form of expressing his message, the inhumanity is complete. ?I remember what I see? The dog is more alive now than ever because people are still talking about it?.

It doesn?t take an animal lover to understand the intellectual grotesque of the whole thing. The display of a dog?s death in the name of a useless gesture. Habacuc against the world, in his prejudiced eyes where we are all hypocrites
Intending to change the world, and change us all, famous tyrants promoted the greatest genocides in history. To Habacuc, against our hypocrisy, was left the power to kill a miserable dog of the streets of Managua. As for art, well, maybe it died a long time ago.