Turner Broadcasting captured the Boston Media yesterday. How? By hiring a young performance artist to put up “lite brite” sculptures of cartoon characters making rude gestures. What concerns me is that these electronic gizmos were affixed all over the area for almost three weeks before anyone noticed them. This does NOT make me more secure.
Also, why arrest the performance artist who was hired to do this ad campaign? This shows a striking ignorance as to the world of performance art. My daughter attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts {SMFA} for a while. “Performance Art” is one of the majors at SMFA, as it is one of the majors at the Massachusetts College of Art {Mass Art} where Peter Berdovsky, the young artist arrested, graduated in 2005. A contract from Turner Broadcasting surely looked like a real winner to a struggling young performance artist!
Anyway, last night my daughter told me about a fellow student at SMFA in the performance art major who “wanted to experience and exhibit the `life of a baked potato’ “. This young artist had herself wrapped in aluminum foil, targeted by several heat lamps, and videotaped living the life of a baked potato. No, I am not kidding. I am providing “half-baked” this as an example of the world of “Performance Art” majors, and not the weirdest, either.
For Turner Broadcasting and its minions to take advantage of Peter Berdovsky this way is merely venal.
For Governor Patrick, and the attorney general to issue media broadsides is surely a way to cover for the fact that these devices were stuck all over, including bridges and subway stations for weeks with no none noticing. That has GOT to be embarrassing.
What is the lesson, if any? Well, if you are a Performance Art Major, maybe you should have an attorney read any contract before you climb bridges and struts; and for the rest of us, I hope if there is anything really dangerous, we notice it a whole lot sooner.
And as for Turner Broadcasting – pay for the over time and all havoc for which you are billed; including Peter’s legal fees. And you sure better pay up anything you owe on this one.
And by the way – more than one blog showed that this was Performance Art not terrorism weeks ago. Once again, the bloggers got it right.
And I think the consensus in general, at least with people I’m talking to, is that this was absolutely silly – embarrassing, even.
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How much you want to bet Turner hired these artists on contract, with no legal obligation to help them with the consequences?
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I hope Turner loses audience if they leave these kids to take the blame. In fact, I’d be all for a boycott, and I LOVE Adult Swim (or I used to…some of their new shows are really lame.) But of course, they own a LOT of other stuff too.
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I’m guessing all you can arrest them for, really, though, is defacing public property…or, am I wrong and there’s some other more serious “crime” they can charge him with?
Way weird. Now the disgrunted employee who made really scary looking fake boms is not arrested – but the goofy artists who took part in a marketing stunt were arrested?? I cannot make sense of this at all. I don’t know what they were charged with, if it was a “hoax” then the charge will cost attorney fees but fail. Nothing put up by the performance artists made any attempt to fool anyone into thinking it was a bomb…fear did that all by itself, I guess.
http://news.bostonhe…