BUT WAS IT ART?

Oscar Wilde e Lord Alfred Douglas

"In January of 1893, the thirty-nine-year-old Oscar Wilde was perfecting the art of 'feasting with panthers'. (...) From [Lord Alfred] Douglas he learned the decadent enchantment of taking beautiful young men (...) out for expensive dinners, then back to his rooms for sex. Money and lavish gifts for the boys followed. Blackmail often came next, with Wilde succumbing to the treats of the 'panthers' to go to the police with incriminating evidence like love letters. Already experts at this form of backhanded prostitution, these youths were then rewarded with more cash. Rather than disgust, Wilde felt an admiration for such greed: 'their poison was part of their perfection'. Corruption and criminality had become aesthetic interests. Art, he felt, required pushing past ideals of good and evil: 'Aesthetics are higher than ethics'". (Deborah Lutz, Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels And The New Eroticism)

"It was precisely 5.47am on the morning of Friday 31 of December 1999 that a dark spirited pluralist began the dissection of 14-year-old 'Baby Grace Blue'. The arms of the victim were pin-cushioned with 16 hypodermic needles, pumping in four major preservatives, colouring agents, memory information transport fluids and some kind of green stuff. From the last and 17th, all blood and liquid was extracted. The stomach areas was carefully flapped open and the intestines removed, disentangled and re-knitted as it were, into a small net or web and hung between the pillars of the murder-location, the grand damp doorway of Oxford Town Museum of Modern Parts, New Jersey. The Limbs of Baby were then severed from the torso. Each limb was implanted with a small, highly sophisticated, binary code translator which in turn was connected to small speakers attached to far ends of each limb. The self-contained mini amplifiers were then activated, amplifying the decoded memory info-transport substances, revealing themselves as little clue haiku's, small verses detailing memories of other brutal acts, well documented by the ROMbloids. The limbs and their components were then hung upon the splayed web, slug-like prey of some unimaginable creature. The torso, by means of its bottom-most orifice, had been placed on a small support fastened to a marble base. It was shown to warring degrees of success depending upon where one stood from behind the web but in front of the Museum door itself, acting as both signifier and guardian to the act. It was definitely murder - but was it art?" (David Bowie, The Diary Of Nathan Adler Or The Art-Ritual Murder Of Baby Grace Blue/Outside)

(2011)