Terrorism is NOT Art

I try not to get into too much political commentary here - but this one I could not let go by...

RIP: An obituary for shock art

Fake bomb didn't bring down the ROM, but it did mark the passing of an artistic era. Fact is, there's little left that can rouse us from our comfortable numbness

http://www.thestar.com/News/article/283666

Christopher Hume
Urban Issues columnist

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson's bomb wasn't real, but it might as well have been.

When the 24-year-old Ontario College of Art and Design student placed a fake explosive device – he called it a "sculpture" – inside the main entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum last week, he confirmed something that everyone outside the art world has known for awhile, namely that art has lost its power to shock.
...
So it's not at all surprising that Jonsson insists he'd do it all again; it was, after all, art. And he, don't forget, is an artist.

Yes, he admits he had no idea that his project would elicit a full-scale emergency response ... "



Hardly - This was terrorism.

Despite what the so called 'artist' thinks he may have been making as a statement, he remains a terrorist. Nothing more. Jail him as anyone else attempting to bomb - to terrorize - would be.

Forget a grand defense based on the history of art. Only a self absorbed fool would expect that planting something that looks like a bomb in a public setting would be seen as anything less than an extreme threat to public safety in our modern world.

I note the reviewer completely ignores the huge loss of both up front cash and hoped for charity donations that this 'art' inflicted on to the fund raising effort planned for the ROM that same day. I doubt any of those people see any value in this 'art'.

This is nothing more that the worst possible extension of the kind of garbage that has come out of OCA since before I was a student there in the 70's. It was crap then - and its even more pathetic crap now.