Before Evaristti, other artists have drawn attention to animal abuse.
Mar 13, 2025 06:55 IST First published on: Mar 13, 2025 at 06:55 IST
The pigs had no wings, but fly they did — with a little help. Artist Marco Evaristti’s plan to starve three piglets as part of an art installation in Copenhagen came to naught after the animals, named Lucia, Simon and Benjamin, were stolen last week by animal rights activists, with assistance from the artist’s friend. Evaristti had intended for his installation, titled ‘Now You Care’, to draw attention to the suffering of animals in Denmark’s meat production industry. Instead, he drew condemnation for inflicting on the pigs precisely the kind of cruelty he was highlighting. Following the theft of the pigs, Evaristti closed the exhibition, reportedly accepting the loss after a few hours because “at least this way the piglets would have a happy life”.
This episode ended well for the pigs, but it has once again trained the spotlight on the ethical quandaries that arise from the use of animals in art. In 2017, for example, New York’s Guggenheim Museum was forced to pull from view three artworks featuring animals: Angry accusations of animal cruelty had forced its hand, said the museum, which feared violence against visitors, should the exhibition continue as intended, even as several critics bemoaned the move as an attack on free expression. That controversy, like the present one, forced the art world to confront tough questions about aesthetic versus moral values, consent and sentience — how do different creatures process what is happening to them? — and whether freedom of expression ends at the hard line where cruelty to non-humans begins.
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Before Evaristti, other artists have drawn attention to animal abuse. Banksy’s ‘Sirens of the Lambs’ featured a slaughterhouse truck driving around New York City, filled with stuffed animal toys periodically emitting shrieks. Performance artist Jacqueline Traide put herself through the force-feeding, hair shaving and injections that animal testing by cosmetics companies involves. No animals were harmed in the making of these artworks. But the message was received.
