NSFW: Artists Get Booted From Art Basel Miami For Breast Milking Performance NSFW
Photo 58392186 © Pavel Ilyukhin | Dreamstime.com
Art Basel Miami Beach organizers reportedly nipped a live breast milking show in the bud at the Satellite Art Show over the weekend.
Milking the Artist, an installation by anonymous conceptual artist OONA and performance artist Lori Baldwin, saw the masked OONA pump glasses of milk in front of a live audience, before putting the human-made commodities up for auction.
Visitors were invited to “milk the artist dry,” meaning they determined the price of the milk.
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“If and only if you milk the artist, then you can own her artwork,” Baldwin quips on Instagram. “Because don’t all these art fairs already milk the artist?”
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This art fair, as you know, is attended by some of society’s wealthiest. With that in mind, it comes as no surprise that buyers splashed pools of money to get a serving of freshly-squeezed cultured milk. The first glass sold for 50 ETH (US$64,000), and the highest amount spilled for a glass was US$200,000.
The bare breast clutched by OONA seemed to be a prosthetic. No matter, as the two artists were still escorted out of the venue by security, TMZ reports.
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Granted, Milking the Artist was an unauthorized, guerilla stunt created in response to Art Basel’s last-minute cancelation of the creators’ SCOPE Gallery work, which organizers had deemed “too controversial.”
The artists might have seen the eviction coming. Milking the Artist, after all, challenges beholders to contemplate the fetishization of female breasts. So who’s the big boob now?
“Milking the Artist straddles the line between provocation and performance,” explains the press release. The performance explores concepts of “ownership, value, censorship, and consumption,” it adds.
On the installation’s website, OONA describes: “Nudity is the gateway drug to the deeper layers of this piece. Sure, the performance panders to the general obsession with objectifying women, but it only stops there if you want it to.”
Baldwin chimes in: “The art world’s insidious underbelly determines which artists to milk and what their milk is worth. In Milking the Artist, we play with context and its relationship to value. We are raising the floor price of feminist performance art.”
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[via Paper Magazine and Real Radio 92.1, images via various sources]
