But Is It Art?

Kind of a weird story from Yahoo tonight. I only clicked on it because the headline referenced two tenured UCLA professors resigning, and I matriculated at UCLA, so I thought there was a possibility I knew or had heard about the professors.

I hadn't.

But the story was interesting anyhow. Even though I feel like vital information is missing from this initial article.

It goes something like this. An unnamed student in a performance art class did a brief presentation wherein he pointed what appeared to be a loaded gun at his head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. But then the student left the room, and a sound effect of a gun going off was played.

Okay, so that's the story. It's maybe not the most brilliant, moving piece of performance art ever created. But then, they are just students, right? That's why you go to college to study these things, is it not? I mean, was, um, uh...someone who's famous for performance art...did they come up with something amazing on their first day? Probably not!

So, the school refused to suspend the student, claiming that there isn't enough evidence of wrong-doing to hold him accountable. And so two teachers resigned in retaliation, saying that they feel this incident amounts to "domestic terrorism."

And this is why I feel like there must be something more to the story. Would two teachers, two performance artists in their own right, really care so much about suspending a student, possibly ruining his future chances of becoming an artist, just because of some bad project he'd been working on? I mean, maybe the idea was a bit misguided. The teachers are saying that the audience felt "genuine fear" during the performance.

But, I mean, they knew they were seeing a piece of performance art, didn't they? If it was so convincing that they felt genuinely afraid, doesn't that sort of mean the guy did a good job? And nothing bad happened. They can't even prove the guy had a real gun! So, what's the big fucking deal?

I don't know...there's something else going on here, and I plan to find out what it is. No, that's a lie, I have no intention of finding anything else out about this story, unless they run it on the front page of Yahoo, or some other place on the Net I look all the time when I'm bored and looking for things to blog about.

YOKO ONO! That's someone who's famous for performance art! Yes!!!!