The Assasination of __________

I just found this on the NY Times City Room blog:

<snip - from City Room>

"This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level."

</snip>

My immediate reaction was just another hack artist relying on controversy to support an easy, dumb project. However there's much more to this than some inflammatory text stenciled on a storefront window. Yazmany Arboleda created a fake exhibition for each candidate which only exist on the Internet in the form of 2 websites documenting the work:

The Assassination of Hillary Clinton
The Assassination of Barack Obama

I don't know if any of the artworks in the exhibition are real or not, but they are really good. The show goes beyond simply being controversial and really probes at the way these public figures have been portrayed by the media and are perceived by the public. All of the tensions, prejudices, and insults underlying the entire campaign are magnified and exagerrated to the point of ridiculousness. Outstanding.

If you read the comments on the City Room blog, it's clear that either the work went waaay over the heads of most people, or they really weren't looking at it at all.

image: from Yazmany Arboleda's Hillary Clinton website