I got wind (no pun intended. Okay, maybe a little) of a development at the Université de Québec a Montréal, which I happen to live next door to. A new art installation has been setup; the infamous Cloaca machine, a traveling mechanical digestive system. The machine takes food (scraps from the UQAM cafeteria in this case) and processes them using various chemical and enzymes, perfectly replicating the human digestive system. That means it makes shit. And farts. All along a fancy looking lab-style assembly with a final "dispenser" that drops the fresh product onto a platter.
That's fucked up enough, and it's enough to make me shake my fist at the idiocy of the art community to support crap (haha) like this and make the rest of us artists look like morons, but wait! There's more! Visitors can buy "souvenirs" from the machine. Do I need to explain this? PEOPLE ARE BUYING SHIT. They are paying money for feces. Excrement. Crap. I can just imagine a happy nuclear family, father dressed in a cardigan, mother in a dour dress, chipper kids in Leave it to Beaver garb, happily strolling out of the exhibit with a turd cradled in their hands, to be taken home as a new addition to their knickknack cabinet. Not only that, they sold out. They sold all the shit they had on hand. Don't make me repeat that. That is FUCKED UP.
The kicker is that, whether you like it or not, your tax dollars paid for it. 30 000$ of government (public) funds were ponied up to transport the thing in Canada (it's a traveling exhibit, so rubes everywhere can have their chance to buy art-turds).
Pictures of the various Cloaca units here:
