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