News   Mar 28, 2024
 685     0 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 467     1 
News   Mar 28, 2024
 790     0 

Bomb Hoax at the ROM

...which inevitably brings us back to the idea that this guy is just a twit.
 
I'm no lawyer, but even though he may get off lightly with the law, CANFAR has a rock solid case if they want to sue him for damages. I hope they do, this MoFo thinks he's done nothing wrong.

Speaking as a law student (who painfully just wrote a torts exams), I doubt they would have a strong case against him. There's no tort for this kind of thing that I can think of. He's got no duty to them. Still, you might be able to make a decent argument for establishing a new tort here, but that would be pretty difficult given the criteria to do that.

Anyway, just as an interesting co-incidence, a good buddy of mine in law school with me is this guy's former roommate from a little while back.
 
Couldn't you frame it in nuisance? He had something dangerous (a bomb, or what a reasonable person would have reasonably assumed was a bomb, as reasonable people in fact did) that he let escape onto the property of the ROM, which, through whatever party contract CanFAR had, was their property for the purposes of the party, which caused them damage.

Though, at this point, it's hard to quantify what CanFARs actual damages might be.

Or, as one of my law school classmates used to sing to Jim Croce's music..."If I Found A Snail In A Bottle..."
 
Typing from a personal injury law office... you guys are thinking too hard.

If by some chance the event was not insured, the lawyers' only option would be to go after the school and any insurance company that covers them. Going after the student is worth nobody's time and won't happen.

They'll recover something. It won't be from the student.
 
Hey, I'm almost 13 years out. I only have to cook up the strategies. Koz gets to to the research to deterime if they'll work!!
 
Going after the student is worth nobody's time and won't happen.

Fake terrorism for art's sake is just so amusing, we should laugh it off! Or, he should just be quietly deported to some third world cesspool and shot. The odds are decent that one of his OCAD buddies will end up killing him for a youtube snuff film, anyway, so let's deny them the chance to make art out of it.
 
I noticed on the front page of one of the papers this week that he, indeed, *didn't* know there was an AIDS benefit going on.

Once again, kiddo, if you want to give your art a little body English, you gotta do your homework. Even the 9/11 masterminds knew as much...
 
Hume

Link to article

AVANT GARDE
RIP: An obituary for shock art


Fake bomb didn't bring down the ROM, but it did mark the passing of an artistic era. Fact is, there's little left that can rouse us from our comfortable numbness
Dec 08, 2007 04:30 AM
Christopher Hume
Urban Issues columnist

Thorarinn Ingi Jonsson's bomb wasn't real, but it might as well have been.

When the 24-year-old Ontario College of Art and Design student placed a fake explosive device – he called it a "sculpture" – inside the main entrance of the Royal Ontario Museum last week, he confirmed something that everyone outside the art world has known for awhile, namely that art has lost its power to shock.

Even before Jonsson's "art project," few cared. After, what's left to say?

The third-year "integrated media" student has helped bring a thudding end to a trajectory launched in mid-19th-century France. Épater la bourgeoisie. Shock the middle classes. That has been the rallying cry of artists and decadent poets for nearly 150 years.

In the name of outraging the respectable, artists have painted abstract canvases, signed urinals, canned their excrement, piled bricks, wrapped raw meat around wire armatures and now, faked the blowing up of a museum.

So it's not at all surprising that Jonsson insists he'd do it all again; it was, after all, art. And he, don't forget, is an artist.

Yes, he admits he had no idea that his project would elicit a full-scale emergency response – can't people recognize sculpture when they see it? – but an artist's gotta do what an artist's gotta do.

Little wonder audiences have grown increasingly shock-proof – and not just about art. After all, Jonsson's just the latest, and maybe last, in a long line of "artists" who would shock us. But as anyone who has watched the evening news knows, there's little left that can rouse us from our comfortable numbness.

Indeed, one looks back at some of the artworks that scandalized European and North American society in the past and smiles.

The outrage caused by a painting such as Manet's Olympia (1865) would simply never happen today. Not only does this kind of deadpan nudity no longer offend, visual culture has lost its power to shock; instead it has become merely irritating, irrelevant, sometimes amusing but always quite beside the point. Keep in mind that Manet's canvas shocked audiences who understood it as an attack on cultural conventions that dated back to Titian, the 16th century and beyond.

Today, art isn't taken seriously, except as an investment, a hedge against inflation or an alternative to the stock market.

(The only exception, of course, is in the Muslim world where any visual depiction of Muhammed, deemed disrespectful, leads to calls for its creator's death.)

Long before the 21st century, the idea of the avant-garde had been emptied of meaning. The phrase, originally a military term that referred to a small advance party sent out to harass the enemy before the main army engaged in battle, was borrowed in the early 1800s to describe a new generation of artists whose work looked not to the past but anticipated the future.

In so doing, they upset expectations and antagonized the Academy, the traditional bastion of culture. As it turned out, however, the middle classes, which were supposed to be shocked, quickly gobbled up the very work that was meant to offend.

Don't be surprised when some collector or other comes along to make Jonsson an offer he can't refuse; and if the piece doesn't end up in the ROM, perhaps the Art Gallery of Ontario, or some such institution could be counted on to put it on display.

Such are the workings of the art world, or at least, the art world as we now know it. This has been the dance at least since the time of the Impressionists – a term, incidentally, intended originally as an insult – earned the disdain of the Academy through their apparently sloppy paintings. That didn't last long; the Impressionists are now enshrined as the most popular art movement in history; to this day, they remain untouchable.

But the forces they unleashed would soon head in different directions.

With the triumph of the middle classes, and the corresponding decline of the aristocracy, art found a new audience, one whose interests lay not in some hazy notion of an idealized past, but in the gritty mechanized future ahead.

Artists were quick to grasp this, and their response was typically ambivalent; in addition to playing to the house, they also sought to turn it on its head.

Jonsson cites as one of his influences the great master of silence and understatement himself, Marcel Duchamp.

Though he produced few works, Duchamp is godfather to generations of artists up to this day. His central insight was embodied on the notion of the Readymade, an ordinary, usually banal, mass-produced object that Duchamp, the artist, transformed into art simply by declaring his intention to do so. He used bottle-drying racks, ceramic urinals, snow shovels ... These are now worshipfully exhibited in major museums, at least those fortunate enough to own one.

Realizing perhaps that in silence he would be golden, Duchamp eventually gave up art for chess.

He would be followed by, among others, Carl André, the American minimalist who became famous in the 1970s for stacking ordinary clay bricks on museum floors. What turned them into art was the context, the gallery itself; two feet outside the front door, they were nothing more than a heap of bricks. When the London's Tate Gallery purchased one such pile in 1972, Britons were aghast.

The interesting thing here wasn't the work itself – in truth one arrangement of 120 bricks looks much like any other – but the fact it had been purchased, validated, by the Tate. The avant-garde, which once defined itself through its attacks on the Academy, had become the Academy.

Thus began a cultural war that had endured for decades, one that Jonsson enjoined with obvious enthusiasm. Canada, needless to say, has been a battleground since the days nearly a century ago when an art critic dismissed the Group of Seven as painters of "hot mush." Then there was the outcry when the National Gallery of Canada bought Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire. And who could forget Jana Sterbak's infamous meat dress, which launched enough of a stink to give a carnivore indigestion.

However misguided Jonsson's efforts, he certainly can't be faulted from an art historical point of view. His understanding of contextual significance, of the artist's omnipotence and the suggestion, however oblique, to bomb the ROM, put him in distinguished company.

The only assumption that no longer applies was that the performance would leave us shocked and appalled. If anything, the public and official reactions were remarkable for their restraint. Though no one was complacent, there was a degree of resignation, of déjà vue and ennui, of we've been through this before.

Indeed, that was true in more ways than one.

For 21st-century art, however, the message was clear – the party's over. The cheap-shot approach based on an endlessly shockable public is dead.

Jonsson's fake bomb didn't bring down the museum, but it marked the final passing of an artistic era. What author Robert Hughes called the shock of the new has become the refrain of familiarity.

May it rest in peace.
 
Today, art isn't taken seriously, except as an investment, a hedge against inflation or an alternative to the stock market.

With lines like these, Hume seems to want to disparage contemporary middle-class society at large. The idea that society is "numb" because "it" is no longer shocked by such "art" is a rather empty analysis. While society may not have been roused into some kind of collective reflection on the shock value of such expressions (not that it ever was so in the past), elements of contemporary society were roused enough to state that this expression was hardly art, and was quite irresponsible.

Fine that the artist wants to believe what he did is artistic expression; it does not mean that anyone else is lacking is understanding by disagreeing with his assertion.

Oh, and art is a very risky form of investment.
 

Back
Top