Why is art so controversial

The content is produced solely by The Conversation. Bulgarian artist Christo -- who is best known for his massive "wrapping" of buildings and other monuments -- unveiled his latest installation, "The Floating Piers. If you visited Italy's Lake Iseo before July 3, you could have experienced what it's like to walk on water. On setting foot on the piers, a floating dock system of , high-density polyethylene cubes which undulate with the waves, visitors will experience the closest approximation to what it's like to walk on water.

Seem like a gimmick, or even more of an amusement park attraction than high art? Maybe, but installation art, in its relatively short history, has always been controversial. The use of installation in contemporary art began to develop in the s as a way of democratizing the art experience. Installation enables the viewer to have a more active role in the consumption of the artwork, rather than passively viewing it. As such, the meaning of the artwork was no longer just about what the artist wanted to express, but about the viewer's experience of and interaction with it.

Until July 3, visitors to Lake Iseo in northern Italy could stroll along a three-kilometer-long walkway across the lake. Tracey Emin built her artistic career around the controversial project Everyone I Have Ever Slept With when she set up the tent and embroidered the names of persons she had slept with or had sexual intercourse.

ORLAN and her series of plastic surgeries to meet the ideals of beauty from the art canon assigned bio politic art in the nineties. The list of the provoking feminist works is endless because our society considers as provocative any artistic practice directly addressing some of the main feminist topics — explicit sexuality, lesbian or queer practices, sex work, pornography matters around violence against women or heavy criticism on patriarchy or religion. But, this statement on feminist art is telling us more about our society than on the artworks, because the cause of the fact we understand some work as controversial lay in its discrepancy with the public moral and criterions of normality.

And feminist art often tends to questions dominant politics, norms and laws. Similarly to feminist art, conceptual art is considered controversial from its beginnings and there are many examples of the works continue to shock the public realm. One of the projects that completely shocked the world with its unacceptable cruelty was the showcase Exposition No 1 by Guillermo Vargas when he tied a dog to a wall in the Codice Gallery in Nicaragua.

Dog was left without the food during the show and even died as a result of starvation. The artist has this radical strategy of provoking intervention at the public but no one who attended the show intervened by giving the food or untied the dog. Many moral questions arose after this piece and one could rightly ask - Is the art concept worth the life of innocent creatures?

Then mayor Rudy Giuliani called the controversial art sick and disgusting. He also threatened to cut funding from the museum, asserting that the painting was offensive to religious audiences. Several months into the exhibition, a visitor smeared white paint on the painting, claiming the image was blasphemous.

This spurred a heated debate about whether this was an act of genius controversial art or vulgar appropriation. One of the women in the photographs, Missy Suicide, fought back by selling prints of the photograph via Instagram. It was where his large-scale sculpture Domestikator was meant to be exhibited in Louvre president Jean-Luc Martinez found that the sculpture, which appears to represent a man having sex with a four-legged creature, was too sexually explicit to be displayed in his museum.

The Centre Pompidou then quickly stepped in and offered its front square as an exhibition space. Van Lieshout explained that the controversial art piece is about the domestication process.

With the sculpture, he says he is trying to start a conversation about the human tendency to dominate nature. Van Lieshout believes humans push for more and more technological developments that will lead to machines dominating the world. Controversial Public Art. Marc Quinn, Self, They can give voice to an underrepresented or alternative viewpoint that challenges the status quo. They may probe our cultural boundaries and can illuminate topics that might be difficult to tackle in other forms of communication.

Creative works can frame issues in surprising and multifaceted ways. Some works are truly multivalent—they offer the viewer or listener abundant opportunity to bring their own meaning to the work.

The work serves as a subjective experience for the viewer and creates a transcultural exchange of ideas. The experience can be an enriching and transformative one for the viewer. However, organizations run the risk that, if the handled incorrectly, the viewer may extract only the most negative interpretation of the work and be offended by it.

Bear in mind that a controversy may erupt more out of the cultural and political environment, rather than the specific intention of the work. Sometimes a controversy may not stem from the work at all but may be instigated by activists to draw attention to their cause.

Seemingly mundane subjects can take an organization by surprise; or, an issue previously thought to be a dependable for controversy may turn out to be unsurprising, and fizzle. Your organization may be treading into controversial areas intentionally, as a part of your work and your mission.

Presenting new works that challenge existing modes of thinking, or presenting issues in a new light, are bound to generate disagreements—which is an important contribution. Develop standard operating procedures. When an issue arises, who should take the call from the press? Think about the channels for communication and each potential contact-point for the public. How do you provide talking points or a script? How quickly can you communicate the scope of the issue to your internal and external stakeholders?

When a controversy is recognized, it is important to set a baseline through a public statement e.