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Into performance art. With murder, it's harder to make a case, but a videotaped burglary by someone who is a skilled burglar could certainly try to make the ca

Into performance art. With murder, it's harder to make a case, but a videotaped burglary by someone who is a skilled burglar could certainly try to make the case that it's art. There is a number of film scenes that are basically that, except the burglary is faked, at which point you're left arguing that this one artistic expression involves harm to people and this other one does not... and the analogy to the porn/prostitution situation is pretty clear at that point, I think.

vacri 10y ago
There is no legal form of performance art that destroys/takes other people's property without their consent. I can't smash up a corporate sculpture with a sledgehammer (without consent) and call it 'art' to avoid prosecution.
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  > There is no legal form of performance art that destroys/takes other people's property without their consent. There are most certainly legal forms of performance art that steal people's time without their consent [1]. How is stealing an hour of someone's time (e.g. by worsening traffic during their commute for a week) qualitatively different from stealing $2 from the same person? I mean in a moral/ethical sense; legally these are different because the law generally doesn't do a good job of treating time as a limited commodity people have and that can be taken away from them, as far as I can tell. That's a problem with our laws, I will grant that. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/californias-1970s-conceptual-art-comes-home-to-berkeley-museum-of-art.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/californias-1970s-conce... cites an example. If it's _too_ egregious as in http://hyperallergic.com/332844/why-did-the-tree-cross-the-road-because-performance-art/ http://hyperallergic.com/332844/why-did-the-tree-cross-the-r... it can in fact lead to legal charges, but note that if the tree had just stopped the performance at the first police request it would still have stolen time from people and gotten away with no consequences. Even as it was, I doubt the punishment will be what it would have been if the same person had stolen a few dollars each from dozens of people.
  - vacri 10y ago
    Switching from a legal debate to a moral one... we may as well go back to first principles and ask why is prostitution illegal in the first place? Plenty of places have legal prostitution and better quality of life for the prostitutes (eg Australia or Germany) than in places where it's illegal.

vacri 10y ago

There is no legal form of performance art that destroys/takes other people's property without their consent. I can't smash up a corporate sculpture with a sledgehammer (without consent) and call it 'art' to avoid prosecution.

bzbarsky 10y ago
> There is no legal form of performance art that destroys/takes other people's property without their consent. There are most certainly legal forms of performance art that steal people's time without their consent [1]. How is stealing an hour of someone's time (e.g. by worsening traffic during their commute for a week) qualitatively different from stealing $2 from the same person? I mean in a moral/ethical sense; legally these are different because the law generally doesn't do a good job of treating time as a limited commodity people have and that can be taken away from them, as far as I can tell. That's a problem with our laws, I will grant that. [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/californias-1970s-conceptual-art-comes-home-to-berkeley-museum-of-art.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/us/californias-1970s-conce... cites an example. If it's _too_ egregious as in http://hyperallergic.com/332844/why-did-the-tree-cross-the-road-because-performance-art/ http://hyperallergic.com/332844/why-did-the-tree-cross-the-r... it can in fact lead to legal charges, but note that if the tree had just stopped the performance at the first police request it would still have stolen time from people and gotten away with no consequences. Even as it was, I doubt the punishment will be what it would have been if the same person had stolen a few dollars each from dozens of people.
- vacri 10y ago
  Switching from a legal debate to a moral one... we may as well go back to first principles and ask why is prostitution illegal in the first place? Plenty of places have legal prostitution and better quality of life for the prostitutes (eg Australia or Germany) than in places where it's illegal.