Friday, June 06, 2008

The A-word

We read:
"This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, "The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama," in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level.

By 9:30 a.m., New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents had shut down the exhibition, and building workers had quickly covered over the inflammatory title with large sheets of brown paper and blue masking tape...

Later, Mr. Arboleda, who is 27, said in an interview: "It's art. It's not supposed to be harmful. It's about character assassination - about how Obama and Hillary have been portrayed by the media." He added, "It's about the media."....

"The Secret Service had to do a whole questionnaire with me," he said. "It was about an hour of questioning. They asked if I owned guns, if I was a violent person, if I had ever been institutionalized." Mr. Arboleda answered no. Nonetheless, he said the Secret Service asked him if he would voluntarily take down the exhibition title from the window.

"I'm renting that space; the space was allocated for an exhibition and it's my right to put those words up," he said. "They said it could incite someone to do something crazy, like break the window. It's terrible, because they're violating my rights. If someone breaks a window, they're committing a crime."

Source

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wait a minute! So if I understand this correctly, they covered up a piece of 'art' talking about the assasination of a non-presidential person (Clinton/Obama) and it is shut down. However, a movie can be made depicting the assassination of the sitting president and not an eye is batted?

And people want you to believe that Bush is taking away free speech? Come on!

While I disagree that this is art (more like the crap spewing out of most liberal colleges today), it shows that it is the left who want to silence anybody and everybody who disagree with them or have an opinion on a subject. Bush let it go and stood up for free speech.

Wow!

Anonymous said...

The President Bush movie was done in the UK, that's why it wasn't shut down.

Anonymous said...

Yes, but it was shown here!