A man who calls himself an artist ties a dog to a wall inside an art gallery.
No, you heard me correctly - we're not talking about the night janitor who
caught the starving animal littering the front steps of the gallery and decided
to vent a lifetime of frustration by pulling off a ridiculously cruel stunt.
We're talking about a man who calls himself an artist. His name is Guillermo
Vargas Habacuc and the year is 2007. Guillermo is one of the artists taking part
in an art exhibition that takes place at a Costa Rican gallery - pompously
called "Centro Nacional de la Cultura" (National Center for Culture). He pays a
bunch of kids to catch the street dog, which he cruelly baptizes "Natividad"
(Spanish for "birth"). His aim is to make an artistic statement about the
fragility and the misery in which all dogs - indeed, all human beings live, and
he achieved just that by letting the dog starve to death tied to a wall, in
plain view of the exhibition visitors, some of whom demanded futilely that the
dog be released.