A museum director in Denmark was acquitted on Monday of charges of cruelty to animals for a controversial exhibit in which goldfish were liquidised in a blender to test visitors’ sense of right and wrong.
The exhibit at the Trapholt modern art museum in 2000 featured live goldfish swimming in a blender. Visitors were given the possibility of pressing the button to transform the fish into a runny liquid.
Artist Marco Evaristti, the Chilean-born bad boy of the Danish art scene, said at the time that he wanted to force people to ”do battle with their conscience”.
Two goldfish died after two visitors pressed the button, and the Danish association Friends of Animals filed a complaint against the artist as well as the director of the museum, Peter Meyer, for cruelty to animals.
Only Meyer was taken to court over the affair, after he refused to pay a 2 000-kroner ($311) fine for failing to respect an injunction to cut the blender’s electricity so that visitors would not be tempted to kill the goldfish.
But the director refused to pay the fine in the name of artistic freedom, leaving police no option but to haul him into court.
”It’s a question of principle. An artist has the right to create works which defy our concept of what is right and what is wrong,” he told the court in Kolding.
The court acquitted Meyer after a technician employed by the blender manufacturer and a veterinarian both testified that the fish did not experience any suffering due to the blenders’ high speed, and said they were ”killed painlessly”.
The artist meanwhile said the idea behind the exhibit was to ”place people before a dilemma: to choose between life and death”.
”It was a protest against what is going on in the world, against this cynicism, this brutality that impregnates the world in which we live,” he said. – Sapa-AFP