I'm not sure if pretentious is the right word
Here's the sickest art exhibit I've heard of.

Canada gives artist $15,000 grant to hang rabbit carcasses in exhibit

A University of Manitoba art professor's federally funded art exhibit of 12 rotting rabbit carcasses strung up in a forest has critics hopping over whether taxpayers should be picking up the tab.

Photographer Diana Thorneycroft was given $15,000 by the Canada Council to complete the installation, which opened on September 17. Art enthusiasts will be asked to tramp into the woods near the St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre with flashlights to see the corpses, which have been suspended, Blair-Witch-like, in trees. Stuffed inside each carcass is one of her own "photographic relics," which will be exposed as maggots decompose the rabbits' flesh.

Called Monstrance, the carcasses in the exhibit are supposed to signify the partially transparent cases or holders in which the bread of the Eucharist is displayed in Roman Catholic churches. An indoor part of the exhibit features 23 shaved toy bunnies with various parts of the real rabbits' bodies stuffed inside.

"I'm celebrating the gloriousness of putrefaction," Thorneycroft said during a preview tour of the exhibit area. "All of us are moving toward death and dust. A lot of people won't acknowledge that."

The subject of two documentaries by CBC, Thorneycroft has exhibited all over the world, including at galleries in Prague and Moscow, and the Carpenter Centre for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.

"The site deals most directly with the realities of death and decay and the way in which all life returns to earth," she said in an artist's statement provided to the Canada Council, which chose her proposal for funding from 232 applications.

John Goldsmith, a spokesman for the Canada Council, said Thorneycroft, 42, applied to a grant program for "mid-career" artists. A jury chose her work because of her lengthy record of well-received exhibits, he added, agreeing the subject matter would be "difficult and challenging." However, he said, "art is not merely to entertain and distract."

Inky Mark, the Reform party's heritage critic and a Manitoba MP, doesn't think "too many people would consider this art.

"I don't think anybody would object to people doing this on their own, but I don't think you need $15,000 to do this. What's the cost of getting a dozen rabbits?"

Thorneycroft said she spent $10 each on the rabbits from a local grocer, and one of them was donated road-kill.

"We do this, and, on the other hand we're axing a national symbol in the Snowbirds," Mr. Mark said.

Louise May, the president of the St. Norbert Arts and Cultural Centre, said she has received a number of complaints from taxpayers and animal-rights activists about the exhibit, but said the centre's board of directors fully supports the show. "People are responding to the way the issue is framed and not necessarily the work itself, because, of course, nobody has seen the work.
(racetraitor has an alibi for, Fri 30 Sep 2005, 4:47, Reply)