Animal cruelty claims force Guggenheim to pull art works

N.Y. museum takes down pieces, citing safety concerns for staff, visitors, artists

The Guggenheim Museum in New York City pulled three pieces from an upcoming exhibit after hundreds of thousands of people signed a petition saying they depicted animal cruelty.

The museum said in a news release Monday that “explicit and repeated threats of violence have made our decision necessary.” The decision was made “out of concern for the safety of its staff, visitors and participating artists.”

The three works were among the nearly 150 making up the upcoming exhibit Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, which will open to the public next Friday.

One work, Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other, created by artists Sun Yuan Peng Yu, shows pit bulls that were trained to fight, tethered to treadmills that face each other. The dogs run without being able to reach each other. Eventually, they grow weary and are seen panting and salivating at increasing levels.

The seven-minute video is a recording of a 2003 live performance.

Another work, Theatre of the World, is a table outfitted with a translucent dome. Inside, hundreds of insects and reptiles ranging from locusts to cockroaches to lizards wander about while a bright lamp shines on them.

“During the three-month exhibition, some creatures will be devoured; others may die of fatigue. The big ones will survive,” the New York Times reported.

The third work, titled A Case Study of Transference, is a video showing a boar and a sow having sex. Both animals are stamped with gibberish symbols, a mix of Chinese and Roman characters.

Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), sent an open letter to the museum Monday criticizing the works and asking the museum to remove them. In the letter, she wrote that all of the animals, including the cockroaches and centipedes, “experience every emotion that you, I and our beloved dogs and cats do.”

An online petition decrying the three works gained more than 700,000 signatures as of early Wednesday morning. The museum’s decision to remove the works was met with both praise and derision.

Newkirk sent a followup note to the museum, thanking it “for withdrawing these vile acts of cruelty masked as creativity.”

PEN America, an organization that works to defend free expression, called the decision “a worrying precedent.”

“That threats of violence became grounds for the cancellation of the works represents a major blow to artistic freedom,” it said in a statement.