“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It is a saying that I often heard when I was growing up, in fact I am still hearing it from Madonna. 

I saw two articles in the news yesterday that made my skin crawl. There are two ‘performance’ art pieces that have grabbed the headlines.  One, is of a man named Guillermo Vargas Habacuc who as an ‘artist’  took a stray dog, chained it to the wall of a gallery and let it starve to death. He was even awarded a prize.  People came and went to the gallery, and watched it happen.  It was so successful that he has been asked to repeat the exhibit this year.

The other ‘exhibit’ is from some crazy art student at Yale - Aliza Shvarts. She is exhibiting a peice that he says features her intentionally inseminating herself repeatedly, and then aborting repeatedly.  Her exhibition “will feature video recordings of the forced miscarriages as well as preserved collection of the blood from the process“.  The ‘process’ took 9 months.  The university (Yale), under the immense public pressure has questioned her and Shvarts now recants her story and says that she made this all up.  The performance art exhibit will still go on though. 

You don’t need to be religious or spritual.  You don’t need to believe in heaven or hell to be a good person.  Within mainstream religions, and within human society there are certain beliefs that unite us.  An underlying one, regardless of how it is phrased, is that we should respect life.   Life of all living things.  Respect for life means treating life and death with dignity, and understanding that life is a finite resource - when it’s over it is over.  We are taught to be respectful of bringing life into the world, and of life leaving the world.  Cruelty to any life should not be tolerated.  Indeed, we see that one of the defining characteristics of truly psychopathic personalities is that those people enjoy being cruel to animals and people.

I do not presume to be anyone’s moral compass.  In fact, I must be VERY narrow minded, because I don’t see either of these ‘exhibits’ as art.  What scares me though is that there are those who would defend the ‘artists’ for expressing their art.  Didn’t some one named Mengele try to defend his actions as “science” once?

I think we can safely say that “the road to hell is paved with ignorance and moral degenerates…”