Some Chick to Give Birth, Then Raise a Baby as Art, So Send Money
You’ve probably heard that performance artist Marni Kotak is going to pop one out live in the next few weeks at Bushwick’s Microscope gallery, but that’s not all. After The Birth of Baby X comes Raising Baby X, wherein spectacles less grand than squeezing out a mammal out of an orifice will be drawn out to a year of “podcast videos.”
Pardon my skepticism.
I’m all for this live birth thing, though I don’t believe simply having an audience automatically makes a human act into performance art.
A performance? Of course!
The exhibit also launches Kotak’s new conceptual work Raising Baby X in which she re-contextualizes the everyday act of raising a child into a work of performance art, reaching out to collectors, private investors and foundations for their support… Weekly podcast videos… document various activities that took place that week, such as breastfeeding, diaper changing, bedtime stories, playtime, sleep, and nursing minor ailments.
It’s just after expressing her “disdain for Facebook” use and its superfluous, banal exhibitionism… You know. I’m not saying you have to fake an abortion or kill yourself. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, but you give me something more or something new, because it sounds like Baby X is biting The Truman Show. “The Birth of Baby X,” Marni Kotak, Oct 8 – Nov 7, Microscope Gallery, Bushwick
Editor-in-Chief:
Pretty much all of my procreating friends are doing this very same performance, for free, all on their own.
The sheer pretension of this is actually impressive.
The only difference between a child and art is that art is generally appreciated by someone other than its creator. This "artist" is no different than any other parent — who thinks their kid is the greatest thing to ever arrive on Earth — and this kid is no different than any other kid, annoying flight passengers and salivating over coin-operated toy dispensers in the K-mart vestibule.
Hey, Artist lady? Your kid is not an art project, they are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and you're not an artist. You're a conceited, arrogant, pretentious parent and your kid is nothing more than a bucket of disease with feet.