10 Shocking Strategies

To Becoming A Best Selling Artist

By T.D. Hare

This is not a work of fiction. It is a work of opinion. The Gospel According To Duchamp
is the manifesto of contemporary art, based on relevant case studies.
In no time at all, The Gospel According to Duchamp might become the main basic guide
to anyone trying to define (and understand) the new art movement known as shock art.

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 This e-book is copyrighted material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred,
distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically
permitted in writing by the Author, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was
purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law.
Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text and illustrations may be a direct
infringement of the Author‟s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Illustrations – T.D. Hare
Copyright @ 2015 T.D. Hare
http://tdhare.com
All rights reserved

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Hey there, artist!
Specification
What, conclusions already?
Being remarkable without shocking people is worthless
The same fucking story
If you don’t make people feel shocked, you don’t exist
The two-path theory
The Provocateurs
Warning!
This book is not addressed to…
To whom is this book addressed?
A new religion
The Greatest Provocateur of all times
What is art?
But if…
Percentages
Do you have to know how to draw to become an artist?
You don’t need a studio
You don’t need to lift a finger (literally) to work on your art
If your art doesn’t make money for you, give it up!
Contemporary art has its own food chain
The second link
The next links in art’s food chain
What if gallery owners, museums, curators ignore me? What then?
Naked city spleen with Miru Kim
You don’t need a degree to make art
The story of Dario Cecchini
Analyze this
Don’t think about works per se. Elaborate projects!
Don’t get depressed if you don’t come up with a lot of ideas

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10 winning strategies to become an artist that actually sells
Strategy #1: Grab the attention of the press!
Be mean!
Strategy #2: Give up drawing, painting and sculpture as much as possible!
Strategy #3: Be blasphemous! Attack religion and church!
A recent example
Strategy #4: Be impudent! Mock sex and sexual taboos!
Make it shocking, but not too much so
What really gets people feel shocked?
We’re living penis times
Oleg Kulik – Dog’s best friend
Are you really nuts?
There’s nothing new under the sun
Strategy #5: Speculate hot socio-political contexts
Strategy #6: Involve animals in your projects!
Damien First
Case study: Helena
Be kind to cats!
Sometimes, even a dog lives a dog’s life…
Shocking facts
No to violence!
Strategy #7: Approach your themes with humor!
Case study: The Voina group
Dark humor
Strategy #8: Make use of the most stupid things that pop up in your head!
My Bed
A friend in need is not always a friend indeed
In the same series
Want some more…?
Do you want original ideas?
Strategy #9: Tackle hot topics!
Of men and mice with Santiago Sierra
Strategy #10: Be a hypocrite!

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How far can I go?
Nitsch the Kitsch
Chinese artists are nuts
Is there a limit?
Epilogue. What’s next?
Can a woman ever really change a man?
New art: 3rdi
About the author
Acknowledgements
Sources

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“Art isn‟t about following the rules.
It‟s about breaking them”.
DAVID SEDARIS

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 “The most courageous act is to still think for yourself. Aloud”.
COCO CHANEL

You, the guy who‟s already finished an art school or maybe is the self-taught kind.
The guy with an everlasting passion for art, who owns a nice, cozy studio, who‟s flooded
the Internet with drawings, photos or canvases and has even created lovely little pages on
specialized websites, in the attempt of getting known and eventually selling something.
You, the guy who works for galleries nobody sets foot into, except friends, family and
cleaning staff.
Hey, you who have earned (close to) zilch from artworks till now.
Yes, my friend, it‟s you I‟m talking to.
Excuse me for getting straight to the point, but have you ever wondered why Maurizio
Cattelan is the one exhibiting in the greatest art gallery in New York, and not yourself?
“What does that guy do that I don‟t?” Have you asked yourself this?
“How did he manage to get so famous, but nobody has the slightest idea who I am?”
This has probably crossed your mind a couple of times, but then you answered yourself:
he‟s more talented, smarter and luckier, has way more imagination and experience and most
probably works better than me.
Bullshit, my friend. That‟s not the answer.
The correct answer is, and make sure you nail this down in your head: Maurizio Cattelan
got where he is right now because, every single time, he had the balls to push the scandal pedal
to the metal, he knew how to make people feel shocked and to promote himself as a controversial
artist.
Maurizio Cattelan is a genuine provocateur, a “bad” boy with only one idea in mind. One
single idea. But one that‟s as obvious as a naked guy in Sunday church, one that he‟s been
sticking to for his entire life: I must provoke shock!
If you don‟t think the same, your chances of doing anything in your career are next to
nothing.

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 “No guts, no story”!
CHRIS BRADY

Wait a minute! Let‟s make sure we‟re on the same page here... I‟m not promoting
scandal, just for the sake of scandal.
I‟m not advising you to stand out as an artist by marrying the next John Lennon or the
next new Cicciolina, by getting hammered drunk, or by roaming the streets 24/7, cross faded as
hell, carrying a two meters long bread loaf on your head.
I‟m not saying it‟s not good to promote yourself by traditional means either. Or by having
your own website, a YouTube channel or exhibiting your work on specialized sites.
What I‟m saying here is that these are not nearly enough.
If you want people to acknowledge you as a valuable artist - and I‟m talking here about
those people who actually matter in the business - and to turn your art into cash, you need to feed
the press with sizzling hot topics.
You need to be shameless.
Rude.
Thick-skinned.
Detestable.
Mean.
Got it?

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 “When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a
subject of interest”.
WILLIAM HAZLITT

My friend, with the risk of disappointing you, in case you‟re one of those thin-skinned
artists, let me tell you that the world of contemporary art is nothing but a continuous struggle.
Do I make myself clear?
It‟s a tough competition in which your works must create a fuss. If nobody‟s scandalized,
you will also remain nobody.
It‟s a jungle that obeys the same survival rules as any other primitive, savage society,
overpopulated and with danger lurking at every corner.
Do you actually know what the greatest danger in the universe of contemporary art is?
Indifference, my friend, this is how it‟s called and, believe me, it‟s more dangerous than a
starving alligator.
It doesn‟t matter how talented you are, how good your drawing skills are, how beautiful
you paint or how original your photos or sculptures are. If you don‟t manage to defeat the
audience‟s indifference, you‟ll take everybody‟s dust. And in order to defeat it, you must make
sure you get people to feel shocked. Permanently.

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 “A successful person is one who can lay a firm foundation with the
bricks that others throw at him or her”.
DAVID BRINKLEY

If you don‟t throw in some ideas that are remarkable and at the same time are strikingly
new and surprising, you‟re out of the game.
You‟re finished. Dead. You‟re nobody.
Quit art, start something new, maybe this way you‟ll eventually succeed in being
somehow useful to society.
If you don‟t agree with this, that‟s it, close this book immediately and throw it away or,
even better, give it forward to a friend or acquaintance, maybe they‟ll know better what to make
of it.
You can be as remarkable as it gets, as an artist. You can have your own, personal touch
in a drawing, paint in a way that nobody has ever tried, or have unique ideas in sculpture. If you
don‟t create shock with whatever it is that you‟re doing, everything‟s worthless.
For example, take a look at this fellow, Pascal Bernier, a Belgian artist. His works,
otherwise rather cute, are mainly stuffed animals that look like they‟d just gotten out of medical
treatment and are unique in the world. His idea, undoubtedly original, attracts, all right. But does
he create controversy? Nope. That‟s why he can‟t aim at Cattelan‟s fame for now.

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 The great conceptualist artist Leon Ferrari also got himself noticed throughout his life by
some absolutely unique and original projects, but only became famous on a planetary level when,
at the Venice Biennial, he shocked everybody with a sculpture of Christ being crucified on an
US bomber plane. One could say he nailed it.

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 “Controversial, as we all know, is often a euphemism for „interesting
and intelligent‟ ”.
KEVIN SMITH

Not only in art. The game plays the same in business, too.
Don‟t tell me you actually imagined that United Colors of Benetton has become such a
well-known company and sold their brand worldwide because they used to make the most
colorful, durable or beautiful clothes on the market.
No, my friend, behind those famous Benetton campaigns was Oliviero Toscani, an artist
who, for 18 years, from 1982 to 2000, worked as a photographer and art director for this
company.
The characters he used in his works are those that, by extremely provoking and shocking
gestures, not to mention buzz marketing, made Benetton big. I‟m talking about newborns
drenched in blood and body fluids, priests French-kissing nuns, guerrilla fighters holding a
machine gun in one hand and a human femur in the other, black women breast-feeding white
children, AIDS patients living their last moments, and death-row inmates staring at the camera in
a close-up that makes the terror in their eyes almost fill the screen.

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 “Innovators are inevitably controversial”.
EVA LE GALLIENNE

The same rules apply to art.

Do you really believe that Damien Hirst would‟ve made it big without getting the world
shocked with his tiger shark immersed in formaldehyde? Would he have reached the fame he
enjoys today if he kept on painting cardboard boxes?
Or Andres Serrano - do you think that if he hadn‟t submerged a crucifix in urine and
photographed it, he would‟ve achieved worldwide fame?
What if Chris Ofili painted the Virgin Mary with acrylics, and not with elephant dung and
porn collages? What do you think, would the mayor of New York have been so scandalized, or
would he have sold the work for the huge amount he actually did?
If Tracey Emin hadn‟t intrigued the world in 1999, exhibiting her unmade bed trashed
with used condoms, empty vodka bottles and dirty underwear at Tate Gallery, do you think she
would have still been awarded, in 2013, a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the
British Empire) by Her Majesty The Queen for services to the arts?
Do you believe that Leon Ferrari would have reached fame by sticking to his
calligraphies and Heliographies if he had not crucified Jesus on a US bomber plane instead?
Do you think that if Michel Journiac had stuck to painting abstract stuff for all his life
and wouldn‟t have had an entire planet shocked with Messe pour un corps (Mass for a Body),
he‟d have made it to the history of art?
This is what this book is all about.
The 10 Winning Strategies in contemporary art that shocks and sells are, in fact, methods
which represent the basis of a solid marketing plan which will help aspiring artists overcome
their present condition, get out of the clutter, and make people talk about them.

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 “Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality”.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG

There are two paths you can take to get yourself noticed as an artist.

The Path of the Big Lottery Winner

Classic. After a life of work, uncertainty and deprivation, doing the same thing you‟ve
been doing for 20-30-40 years now, one day you have the devil‟s own luck and your whole
career is finally acknowledged.
Critics suddenly realize your way of expressing yourself is absolutely original, not to
mention brilliant, your canvases or sculptures are sold for some millions each, you‟re harassed
by museums, and collectors queue in front of your studio as if you‟d be the first on Earth to sell a
new iPhone.
This is the path all artists are daydreaming about. The most correct. Yet simple. The most
beautiful. Almost perfect. It has one flaw, though. The probability of winning the jackpot is 1 in
13.983.816 people, approximately 1 in 14 million. I cannot ignore the fact that 13.999.999
artists, out of the 14 million, don‟t get that lucky. What about them?
Even in the “6 out of 44” lottery, the probability of winning the jackpot is about 1 to 7
million. What then?

The Path of the Great Provocateur

This is the path I‟m discussing in this book. This is the way you should choose to show
the whole world “Who‟s the Daddy Now.” All you need to do is find a theme that will scandalize
the press and will get journalists writing about it. All you need to do is make people feel
shocked. Be “bad,” even “rude.” And you don‟t need a lifetime of work to get it running. Nope.
Not at all.

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 This method is easy to use both by young artists, up to thirty years old, and by those over
eighty. Which, by the way, was Leon Ferrari‟s age when, during the 2007 Venice Biennial went
from an illustrious nobody to one of the most notorious artists on the planet. (Fun fact: he created
this piece of art back in 1965. The Vietnam War was going on right then, but nobody had given a
damn about the work until that Biennial. Probably because he had been showing it in the wrong
places.)

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 “If you really want the key to success, start by doing the opposite of
what everyone else is doing”.
BRAD SZOLLOSE

I drew up a list containing the names of some of the artists who have chosen the “Way of
the Great Provocateur”. Those who have been scandalizing the society for the last decades are
mentioned in this book, by name or by their audacity. Wait, this doesn‟t mean that those I didn‟t
get to talk about in this book are not valuable. I just didn‟t see it as the right time to write about
them. Maybe I‟ll do it some other time. Here‟s the list:
1. Marcel Duchamp
2. Francis Picabia
3. Damien Hirst
4. Jeff Koons
5. Joseph Beuys
6. The Voina Group
7. Maurizio Cattelan
8. Marco Evaristti
9. Oliviero Toscani
10. Santiago Sierra
11. Dario Cecchini
12. Leon Ferrari
13. Banksy
14. Joey Skaggs
15. Piero Manzoni
16. Wim Delvoye
17. Gianni Motti
18. Tracey Emin
19. Gil Vicente
20. Emer Roberts
21. Ron English
22. Lars Vilks
23. Stuart Ringholt

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24. Pierre et Gilles
25. Saiman Chow
26. Graham Ovenden
27. Wyatt Neumann
28. Amber Hansen
29. Irina Ionesco
30. Piero Golia
31. Julien Previeux
32. Spencer Tunick
33. Oleg Kulik
34. Andres Serrano
35. Blue Noses
36. Tinkebell
37. Jan Fabre
38. Adel Abdessemed
39. David Shrigley
40. Andrei Cadere
41. Marina Abramovic
42. Ulay
43. Orlan
44. Michel Journiac
45. Ivan Moudov
46. Marc Mc Gowan
47. Guillermo Vargas Habacuc
48. Elizabeth Demaray
49. Vito Acconci
50. Yoko Ono
51. Chris Burden
52. Hermann Nitsch
53. Wafaa Bilal
54. Casey Jenkins
55. Leigh Ledare
56. Tom Sachs
57. Tom Otterness

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58. Zbigniew Libera
59. Chris Ofili
60. Milo Moire
61. Miru Kim
62. Erik Ravelo
63. Pyotr Pavlensky
64. Mao Sugyama
65. Bas Jan Ader
66. Marianne Maric
67. Suan Yuan and Peng Yu
68. Zhu Yu
69. Cheng Li
70. He Yunchang
71. YOU (soon you‟ll see your name written here)

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 “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don‟t need to
have”.
ANDY WARHOL

Let me make this clear: what you have in front of your eyes is neither a piece of literature
discussing art critique, nor a book about the history of art.
And that‟s merely because I‟m not an art critic.
In the following pages, I won‟t advocate for the importance of artistic movements,
methods or new techniques in contemporary art. I won‟t judge the value of one or another artist‟s
artworks, either.
It‟s not my job to judge whether, for example:
1. Damien Hirst is truly gifted
Or
2. He‟s an important artist
3. He‟s valuable
4. His works are worth millions of bucks each
5. His art will pass the test of time.

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 The only thing I know is that Damien Hirst is the most famous, controversial, shock-
seeker and wealthy contemporary artist in this part of the galaxy and I want to reveal how he
managed to achieve it all.

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 “We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse”.
RUDYARD KIPLING

...Those who draw, paint, embroider or take photos in their spare time, solely for their
personal drawer, their nephews‟ garbage bin or to impress their family, friends and colleagues.
...Amateur artists who only make art to kill boredom, to cope with job-induced stress or
because they find it cool.
...Artists who consider that all there was to be discovered in art has already been
discovered, and therefore refuse to experiment anymore.
...Sketchers, painters and photographers who focus on landscapes, still life, flowers,
children, cats, dogs and other critters.
...The large audience who reckons that the only, truly, important painters are Rafael,
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Rembrandt, and besides these fellows‟ works there‟s
nothing more to find in the history of art.

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22
 “An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long”.
ROBERTO LONGO

...First of all, to the artists who think more with their heads and less with their hearts.
…This book is especially addressed to the young artists. To those who understand that
provocative, shock-creating ideas represent their only hope to say goodbye to mediocrity once
and for all.
...This book is addressed to all creative people, art directors, copywriters and creative
directors in advertising agencies. They are artists too and need directions and ideas to evolve.
...To all those who are fed up with being small brands and wish to become successful
brands.
...To those provocateurs that want to achieve quick awareness, those who want to kick up
a fuss (marketing buzz, in ad language) and controversy.
...To the artists who understand that, in order to get out of the crowd and to be
appreciated, they need to differentiate themselves from the masses. But what does differentiation
mean, anyway? Well, it means to step away from the herd, to be the sheep with wolf-like
behavior, the shepherd who wears a silk hat and not a cap, or the sheep dog that roars like a lion
instead of just barking.
...To all the owners of art galleries, curators, open-minded agents willing to get their
names out there, too. They are the guys herding courageous artists.
Last but not least, this book is addressed to the large audience, who is fond of
contemporary art.

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 “To me, it‟s not strange. Everything else is strange”.
FRANK GEHRY

If contemporary art had been a religion, then, without a doubt, the name of the Chosen
One would have been Marcel Duchamp.
The Messiah of readymade, the Prophet of conceptual art, the Savior of new art trends
after World War 2, that was Duchamp.
For most artists and critics, Duchamp was a French artistic genius, a guy with strong and
strange features, who radically changed the course of art history over the last hundred years.
To fully understand the revolution he created in art, please imagine that one day, during a
dance contest, a housewife shows up on stage and starts cooking.
The housewife, a contestant with some city-miles on-board, a bit chubby and wearing a
plastic bag on her head to protect her hair and a flower-pattern apron to cover her ginormous
breasts, does nothing but cook, while a tiny radio placed next to the oven plays some indistinct
music.
That‟s it. No complex choreographies, no swirls, no waltz routines. And no tango steps.
Eh? I‟m absolutely sure that the spectators would shout, whistle or fuss about in their
chairs for a while until they realize that the lady‟s flurry behind the pot or her vegetable-cutting
moves are, in fact, the dance itself.

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“At first, they‟ll only dislike what you say, but the more correct you start
sounding, the more they‟ll dislike you”.
CRISS JAMI

In a way, that happened with Duchamp‟s artistic act. That magical, historical, sublime
moment, or whatever you fancy calling it. Well, that moment started it all.
In 1917, at the Independent Artists‟ Showroom, the guy came up with a super-idea that
made a world of difference: he exhibited a urinal as a sculpture. A urinal reoriented to 90 degrees
from its normal position of use on which he wrote R. Mutt.

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 This is the reason why, as far as I‟m concerned, Duchamp was never that much of a great
artist as he was a brilliant marketing strategist. Not to mention a perfect provocateur.
The Frenchman felt that if he was to differentiate from the rest of the world, he needed to
do something strikingly new, something that would make people feel shocked, something
different, something that had never been done up to that day. And that was not to paint
something using his blood instead of oil paint or to carve in matured cheese instead of marble.
He changed the very concept of fine arts. He turned them into visual arts. Thanks to him,
from that moment on, fine arts finally meant more than drawing, painting, sketching, engraving
or sculpting.
Welcome to the world of readymade, performances, installations, interventions, actions,
conceptual art, video art and many others.
All that has happened to art ever since, is due to Duchamp. Including this book you‟re
reading.
If you find Duchamp‟s act trivial, then try to come up with a differentiating, shock-
creating, controversial idea yourself. An idea with enough oomph to turn an entire domain upside
down the way his did with his art.
Think about it. At least one idea.
Do you think it‟s easy?
Hell no.

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 “The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and
Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and
they‟ve changed the world. That is art”.
FERRAN ADRIA

In the beginning, art wasn‟t art. Until the 18th century, art was just a craft whose only
recipients were the church, the state, or the wealthy.
Young painters or sculptors with the will to attend the school of a great master had to
study for years. And drawing was not their only object of study. They also had to learn about
blending the colors with different clays, coloring, making brushes, stirring and grinding colors,
preparing panels and canvases.
Even more, they had to learn all of these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy,
medicine, anatomy, astronomy, perspective, history, arithmetic and drawing theory.
Nowadays there are no schools such as those belonging to great masters like Filippo
Lippi, Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio or Rubens were, as there are no apprentices like Botticelli,
Michelangelo, Rafael, Van Dyck or Ingres anymore.
It was easier back then, much easier than nowadays: works were commissioned and paid
without exception. It was as easy as booking a table at your favorite restaurant. Back then you
would‟ve had no need to struggle to get noticed and maybe get paid for your works, as it happens
today.
For hundreds of years, billions of drawings, paintings, engravings and sculptures were
created, all of them representing biblical themes and portraits. We owe to those times the figures
of famous saints, famous disciples, famous priests, famous popes, famous kings, queens and
princes, famous rulers and princesses, famous noblemen, famous merchants and so on.
Today, Art means mainly marketing. Bear this in mind:

If you want to make art, you need information, provoking ideas, hard work, perseverance,
money and lot of guts. You don‟t need to know how to draw, paint or sculpt. You don‟t need to
go to art school to become a visual artist. You don‟t even need to know too much about the art
domain. You just need to know how to make people feel shocked and have the balls to do it.
The artists of today only need to have a vivid imagination, one that would generate ideas
as provoking and wacky as possible. And of course, they need this book you‟re reading:)

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 “My Atelier Is The Street”.
ULAY

...If you have world-class ideas, you won‟t need tons of props or money to impress
people.
Maurizio Cattelan was 42 years old when he got invited to exhibit in New York, at the
Daniel Newburg Gallery in SoHo.
His work consisted of two elements only: a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling,
which the artist said it represented the world and a live mule which was urinating and defecating
his way up and down the gallery.
This is probably the reason why the exhibition was halted after just one day, following
the neighbors‟ complaints.
Guaranteed success!

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 “Eighty percent of success is showing up”.
WOODY ALLEN

100% of the artists believe they have an innate talent.

To answer to this divine calling, they go to art schools, and only then start working.
90% of them draw, paint or sculpt quietly, making the most out of their originality and
talent.
But how come the most talked about are the other 10%?
90% of public discussions are about those who seek and use the shock value in anything
else: photography, video art, conceptual art, installations, performances, actions, interventions
and so on.

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“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is
sure”.
MARK TWAIN

You don‟t need to be talented. Not in drawing, not in painting, sculpture or photography.

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 “I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat -
yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution”.
MARINA ABRAMOVIC

Maurizio Cattelan, the famous neo-conceptualist artist, once said that he has no need of a
dedicated space for creating. He said that his studio is his cellphone. Plus his fax and e-mail.
Indeed. This Italian, who‟s been living in a 2 bedroom apartment in Greenwich Village,
New York for the last decade, only relies on his shocking ideas and on a solid network of
collaborators in the US and overseas. He usually spends hours on the phone discussing details
regarding the execution of his works. This is how famous, extremely well sold works, La Nona
Ora, Him, L.O.V.E., The Ballad of Trotsky etc., were created.
If you want to become that kind of artist people actually talk about, you don‟t need a
studio, easel, paints, welding gear, huge metal poles, ovens, nubby stumps or blocks of stone.
Don‟t even bother.
All you need is to have a provocative sketch or idea in your head and let others work for
you. In most civilized countries there are already companies dealing with the production of art
projects.
So just focus on coming up with shocking, wacky, crazy, brilliant ideas and then call your
supplier and have him take care of everything.

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 “People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish... but that‟s only
if it‟s done properly”.
BANKSY

According to common sense, artists carry out their works themselves.

And a hundred of years ago or so Van Gogh, Gauguin, Manet, Renoir and Picasso
wouldn‟t have even dreamt of doing otherwise.
Yet today, famous artists like Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Maurizio
Cattelan or Gianni Motti (and the list could go on) only come up with ideas and then just oversee
the works.
Execution, that‟s other people‟s business.
It doesn‟t matter if it involves catching a live shark and plunging it into formaldehyde,
hiring a yogi and having him buried with one hand sticking out, or getting a guy dressed-up as a
cop to meditate in Lotus position inside a museum.
You won‟t have to execute anything with your own hands, and that‟s a fact. Just make
sure you come up with the idea and hire the right guy(s) to execute it.

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 “God put Picasso on earth to show us what it‟s like to be really rich”.
SAUL STEINBERG

The idea that artists are bound to starve is a nonsense.

In November 2014, Christie‟s sold a record $852.9 million of contemporary art in a one-
day New York auction.
A woman from New Zealand, who spent £70 last year on two Banksy drawings, sold
them recently for £125,000.
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Maurizio Cattelan, Wim Delvoye, Takashi Murakami, Banksy
or Anish Kapoor are not poor people. In fact it‟s the other way around, my friend. They have
millions, tens of millions of dollars. Each!
However, none of them was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Damien Hirst was born in Bristol and raised in Leeds as the son of a car mechanic (who
left his family when Damien was 12) and a clerk working for the Citizens Advice Bureau. The
guy was poor.

33
 But his brilliant ideas, which provoked and shocked an entire planet, made him rich. The
idea to exhibit a huge shark immersed in a formaldehyde-filled tank and to name the artwork The
Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living is worth every single dime it has
brought to him.
Never forget: genuinely shocking ideas will always make you rich.

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 “Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don‟t quit when you‟re
tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired”.
ROBERT STRAUSS

According to Wikipedia, a food chain is a linear sequence, which shows how the
organisms are related with each other by the food they eat. The number of links in a food chain is
variable; there usually are 3-5 links, and rarely reaching a greater figure.
The first link is represented by the producers, which are usually the plants. There are
many types of animals (the second link) that will eat the products of the photosynthesis process.
In the third link we find secondary consumers, in the fourth one the tertiary, and in the fifth one
the quaternary. Links 3-5 are represented by polyphagous animals (which eat mixed foods and
are also called omnivorous) and zoophagous (also called carnivorous).
As a general idea, there are 3 distinct types of food chains: predators, saprophages and
parasites.
But there‟s also a fourth one and I bet my bottom dollar that you have no clue which one
it is. It‟s the one I‟m going to talk to you about in the following part of the book: the food chain
of contemporary art. Like in nature, each organism feeds on the organism below it in the chain.
Your art projects have to be original insomuch that they get mass media attention. And
when I say original, I‟m only pointing out at those that seem so stupid at first glance, that one
would slip an honest “God Forbid, only a moron could come up with this.”
This is your fundamental mission: to disturb to such an extent with your art that the press
will prick its ears.
You‟ve just got grasp of the first link of the food chain. And you‟ve just got a glimpse of
the first sure Strategy to get successful in art.

35
 “Even if you‟re on the right track, you‟ll get run over if you just sit
there”.
WILL RODGERS

The second link in the artistic food chain is somehow more complex and is based on
catching the eye of gallery owners or agents. These guys want to make money, obviously. They
are business people greedy for success and, therefore, feeding on the information supplied by the
press.
Have I come upon an artist who causes some stir in the press? This one has something to
say. What if he exhibits in my gallery? That would mean less money on advertising. We just
need to say he‟s that guy who did that thing that brought the Vatican to its boiling point one
month ago, and that‟s it! Half of the job is done! His works have already been ranked by
turnover on the art market.
Usually, galleries or agents are surrounded by a bunch of art critics, most of them friends
or “house regulars.” These help the artist, indirectly, sell more, by sending positive messages,
both to art columns in specialized press and to museums.
The scheme is simple:
Press attention = Gallery owners‟ attention + Agents‟ attention.
Gallery owners‟ and agents‟ attention + Critics‟ attention = Museums‟ attention.

36
“Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape
it”.
BERTHOLD BRECHT

The third link of the artistic food chain is the attention coming from museums, which
feed themselves on artists‟ works. When critics and the press manage to convince museums that
a certain artist has got what it takes, they put on major shows and sometimes even buy artworks
for good prices. That‟s a damn good reason for gallery owners, agents and artists to crack open a
bottle of champagne.

37
 But museums have their own reasons for joy because who do they lure into their
exhibitions? That‟s right, the public. So this third link can be drawn based on this brief scheme:
Museums‟ attention = Public‟s attention
The fourth link in art‟s food chain is the most important, as far as I can see it. That‟s
because we start talking only about business. Here‟s where the art collectors step in. They see art
as an investment, pretty much like stocks, real estate, gold or foreign currency.
Once someone‟s works are shown at Tate Gallery or MoMA, it‟s obvious that we‟re
dealing with an asset that promises to multiply the initial investment on a short, medium or long-
term scale.
Today we buy the shark preserved in formaldehyde for £50,000, and obviously, some
years later, we‟re going to sell it for ten times the price. This is exactly how it went, actually. We
can also reduce these facts to:
Press attention + Museums‟ attention + Public‟s attention = Collectors‟ attention
The last link in contemporary art‟s food chain is by far the most enjoyable for an artist
who lives off his own work. Once the press, in its appetite for thrills, starts writing about him,
astonished by his wacky pieces of art, while gallery owners and museums are buttering him up
for wonderful new works that will vacuum money from contemporary art lovers‟ pockets and
from collectors looking for sure investment opportunities, our artist makes a lot of money, more
money than all the pockets in his wardrobe can handle.
Once you‟ve managed to crack this for the first time, the script writes itself: the
contemporary art museum acquires one of your works for its collection and pays for it through
the gallery or the agent and then exhibits it. By selling tickets and creating publicity, the museum
will make a couple of times more money than invested.
Besides the money, the gallery also cashes in and pays you for the works it sells to other
private collectors or museums.
It‟s simple, right?

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 “Success is a great deodorant”.
ELIZABETH TAYLOR

Just ignore them yourself.

Leave them alone! You don‟t need them. Get out there. Make stuff with minimum
investment. And if you sport a pair of balls, do as Ulay did: steal a painting from the National
Gallery in Berlin and hang it inside some poor Turkish immigrants‟ house.
You only need mass media attention; that‟s all. If the press doesn‟t notice you, then yes,
you have a problem, but as long as you grab their attention, sooner or later, things will work out
just fine.
Take Milo Moire, for instance. She doesn‟t need to exhibit in traditional galleries or
museums. She puts on a series of provocative performances right next to the big art fairs instead.
Her strategy: these events gather tons of relevant press from around the world. There‟s no way
she‟ll pass unnoticed.
Remember drip painting, a technique preferred by some artists that involves splattering
paint on a white canvas? This is what probably inspired Milo, the artist from Dusseldorf, to
attempt making the people feel shocked. It went like this: she displayed herself in front of a
well-known art fair, pushing and dropping paint-filled eggs on a canvas out of her vagina. It was
literally out of the box.
The resulting abstract paintings have zero artistic significance of any kind, but that‟s not
the point here. The artist claims she uses the eggs as a symbol of birth and that she creates a
personal and intuitive experience through which she explores the profound intensity and honesty
of her art while using the original source of femininity, her vagina, to give birth to art.
Milo Moire is also the author of another art performance that involved her walking naked
around town. She nipped along to Art Basel wearing nothing but painted inscriptions of the
names of clothes items she would normally wear.
The artist‟s performance was meant as an appeal to people to wake up from daily routine
and start noticing things they don‟t see anymore, especially those related to their close
environment.

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“Modern paintings are like women, you‟ll never enjoy them if you try to
understand them”.
FREDDIE MERCURY

Miru Kim is a Korean artist who is as beautiful as Milo Moire.

She is surely aware of this fact, which is probably why she chose a single stance in her art
photography: nudity. Wearing only her birthday suit, she poses in as shocking as possible
environments: naked between hundreds of pigs in a farm, naked inside Berlin‟s bunkers, naked
in the corners of Paris, naked inside tunnels in London and naked in deserted New York subway
stations.
But she‟s not only attracted to cold, mysterious scenery inside the bowels of the earth.
She also had surface photos of herself taken at zero degrees Celsius in the middle of the
winter, up on the Saint Jacques Tower in Paris. She also had some photos of herself taken in
Istanbul and many other places on Earth. Needless to say – she was naked in each of those
pictures.
Brrr!

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“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which
ones to keep”.
SCOTT ADAMS

What good will come of it?

A university degree in fine arts is as useful or, on the opposite side, as useless for a young
artist‟s work as a business, marketing, mathematics, architecture or medical degree.
Anyone can make art and is entitled to.
More important than to graduate with any or all the degrees I mentioned above is to learn
what life has to teach you.
Travel a lot, see a lot, read a lot, flirt with different domains and specialize yourself in as
many things as you can.
Only then can you start thinking about art projects.
And it‟s going to be much easier for you. Trust me.

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 “There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass
through the needle of mob intelligence”.
REBECCA WEST

When the European Union put a ban on the sale of bone-in beef (fearing that mad cow
disease would spread), an Italian named Dario Cecchini came up with an idea: a provocative
performance meant as a protest against the decision.
Everybody was shocked when he held a mock funeral procession and buried a T-bone
steak rolled up in a shiny black coffin in front of his workplace.
Following his act of art, his image appeared all over the magazines and travel guides.
Reputed marketer Seth Godin talked about him in his book Purple Cow. Even today, people
from all over the world travel to Italy to meet, talk and have photos taken next to the guy.
Fun fact: Dario Cecchini is not a neo-conceptualist artist, as you may think, but a butcher
who has never considered what he did as art.
His 250 year-old butcher shop in Panzano, in front of which he buried the steak, is almost
always crowded. He is considered the wealthiest, most famous butcher in Italy.
To quote Seth Godin: “Is his meat that good? Probably it is not. But by transforming
meat-purchasing in a political and intellectual exercise, Dario found more than one way to make
money from a cow -this time, a remarkable one.”

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“Everyone has talent. What‟s rare is the courage to follow it to the dark
places where it leads”.
ERICA JONG

You know what? Sometimes, common people - I mean, all those who apparently have
nothing in common with art - don‟t even realize they perform an artistic act when, in fact, they
do.
All that these people do is fight for their rights or to fix an injustice they‟ve suffered
from. With this purpose in mind, they invent things as original as they can, sometimes even
extreme ones, to draw attention to their matter.
But they fail to acknowledge the artistic meaning of their actions. If you ask me, Dario
Cecchini and everyone alike are remarkable contemporary artists.

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 Maybe it‟s not such a bad idea for you to think about how to fix an injustice or protest
against something that bothers you and do something as original and shocking as possible - not
“artsy-fartsy,” just original and provocative.
Give it a shot! Later on, you‟ll figure out if you stirred up controversy and your idea can
be considered art.

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 “Have no fear of perfection - you‟ll never reach it”.
SALVADOR DALI

When they lacked inspiration or drive, impressionists would often go into the great
outdoors and finish 1-2 canvases by sunset. Afterwards, they would walk around, frantically
chasing art merchants who would buy their paintings in exchange for paints, brushes or a bottle
of absinthe.
That‟s when they weren‟t using their paintings to decorate pigsties…
Today, things have changed radically. Projects are made according to various biennial
themes or to galleries‟ and museums‟ requests. People work with budgets, precise exhibition
spaces, elaborate marketing campaigns and a very well-defined target market.
Galleries or agents, playing the role of merchants back in the days, launch the orders to
the artists. There are deadlines and contracts involved, signed by both parties, just like in a well-
thought-out business. Nobody wastes time anymore, and everybody has the same exact target.
That target is profit.

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 “A brand becomes powerful if you narrow its focus”.
AL RIES

There‟s no point in having one thousand banal ideas. One truly shocking, disquieting
theme that allows you to develop one thousands executions is enough.
Take Spencer Tunick, for example. The American photographer only needed one
absolutely shocking idea: to organize large-scale nude photo shoots in public locations.
He photographed 5,200 tanned, naked bodies on the stairs of the Sydney Opera House to
promote Mardi Gras. He took pictures of 700 people in the Macon vineyards to draw attention to
the effect global warming is having on French wine production. He also lined up and
photographed 700 nude people, shivering with cold, on a glacier in Switzerland for a similar
Greenpeace campaign.
A couple of years ago, Tunick was awarded the “Man of the Year” title in Chile, where
despite numerous censorship attempts, thousands of sexual liberation revolutionaries rushed to
pose for him.
No matter where he goes, this artist manages to create rumor. Hundreds of resentful
Christians organized a protest in front of the hotel where he was staying in Chile. And he‟s
already been arrested five times by the New York Police Department.
He claims it‟s not the shock value he‟s after. But it seems like he‟s aware of the tenth
Strategy for success :)
“This river of naked people on the streets is my way of describing cultural progress. I‟m
lucky to get more attention than other artists, but this is a sword that cuts both ways,” he says.

46
 However, Tunick insists that he is not a trendy artist, a novelty in the art game, but admits
that what he does is partially a performance.
He is a hero for lots of people following him all across the Earth, for naturists and for
those who, by joining the nude photo shoots, regain confidence in their own bodies‟ image.
“Nudists are those who make for 0.5% of my works, but it‟s not just about running
around naked. It‟s wonderful when this thing changes the way you see yourself and the world,
but I never actually, really think about this.”
If he says it, so be it!

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 “I wondered at times what the 10 Commandments would have looked
like if Moses had run them through the US Congress”.
RONALD REAGAN

1. Grab the attention of the press!

2. Give up drawing, painting and sculpture as much as possible!
3. Be blasphemous! Attack religion and church!
4. Be impudent! Mock sex and sexual taboos!
5. Speculate hot socio-political contexts!
6. Involve animals in your projects!
7. Approach your themes in a humorous manner!
8. Make use of the most stupid things that pop up in your head!
9. Tackle hot topics! (Racism, humiliation of peers, modern slavery, sexual intolerance,
the Holocaust)
10. Be a hypocrite! (Stir up controversy, but use every occasion to deny that your purpose
is to have people shocked)

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 “No controversy, no PR”.
TIM FARGO

Press agencies, TV stations, newspapers, the Internet -anything works as long as they‟re
covering your art projects, provided that the actions they talk about are as shocking, weird,
wacky, stupid, reprehensible and scandalous as they can get.
Do not forget: even in art, positive stuff sells much worse than naughty stuff. It‟s the
naughty stuff that gets attention and creates buzz. Take Gianni Motti‟s example. He‟s an artist
who, in the eighties, used to call different press agencies to claim responsibility for several
catastrophes, including the crash of the Challenger space shuttle.
In 1992, the guy contacted Keystone, the American press agency, and declared himself
responsible for the earthquake that had just created a 70-kilometer-long crack in the Californian
desert.
Taken by surprise at first (what the hell is this lunatic mumbling about?), journalists
started playing his game and, mainly to entertain their audiences, eventually broadcasted the
news and the press release in which the artist was assuming the paternity of this huge artwork
meant to make a lot of famous artists go green with envy, especially Walter De Maria, the great
American sculptor and composer, renowned for his Land Art projects in the US Southwestern
deserts.
In July 1994, Motti struck again, this time using France-Presse (AFP) to claim
responsibility for the recent earthquakes in the Rhône-Alpes region in France.

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“When a dog bites a man, that is not news, but when a man bites a dog,
that is news”.
CHARLES ANDERSON DANA

Even the good old radio can be used to get to the public when you know how to handle it,
as you will find out below.
Eating the Queen‟s Dogs, one of the two art protests against RSPCA‟s (animal rights
organization) failure to bring Prince Philip in court for a bunch of images showing him
exterminating a fox, is the “piece of resistance” of Mark McGowan‟s provocative, protesting art
(he‟s also known as The Artist Taxi Driver).
The story, reported as such in both quality and tabloid press, was broadcasted live on
Resonance FM radio station in London, with McGowan standing in front of a posh café close to
Downing Street, surrounded by press people.
You may wonder why he specifically used Corgi dogs. Well, that‟s because during her
entire existence, Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain has always shown the
world her unconditioned sympathy for the Pembroke Welsh Corgi breed.
McGowan, otherwise a devoted vegetarian, who had made the Corgi meat into kebabs,
told BBC he didn‟t actually murder the Corgis and that they had died of natural causes on a dog
breeding farm.
As expected, his action got significant worldwide coverage. Yahoo, CBS News and
Canadian CBC were the first to talk about it. I have to mention that the Queen is still the
sovereign of Canada, so the protest was described there as one piece of shock art that went too
far.
Despite fierce protests and legal threats, the action was performed without any kind of
interference to its very end and picked up a healthy amount of sympathizers. Bear in mind that an
anti-system attitude attracts instant followers and friends and raises sympathy and popularity
levels for those who display it.
This is why you need to prepare a bad, cheeky, irreverent speech to publicly explain your
work. Press agencies, newspapers and TV stations all adore this kind of stuff.
When questioned about the series of drawings in which he depicted himself killing nine
great leaders of the world, Brazilian artist Gill Vicente declared that his shocking idea was born
out of his disappointment induced by the leaders, who he sees as bad guys who cannot be
punished.
“Because they kill so many people, their extermination will come across as a favor, see?”
Vicente said.

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 “If God were alive today, He‟d be an atheist”.
KURT VONNEGUT

If you want to get yourself out there and remarked, it‟s time to forget about portraits,
landscapes, nudes, flowers, animals and still life paintings. Kiss abstract, cubist, surrealist,
dadaist, naive, constructivist, impressionist and expressionist paintings goodbye. They‟re already
classic and obsolete. If you want to get noticed by someone else than your friends and relatives,
this is not the way to do it.
Thereby, if you want to see thousands of examples of how not to make art gathered in
one place, go to saatchionline.com. I really don‟t understand what those poor fellows are hoping
to achieve (definitely not fame or people‟s attention).

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 But I wrote “as much as possible” in italics on purpose because if you‟re struck by such a
brilliant concept, such as Gill Vicente‟s, who shocked the audience at Sao Paolo Biennial with
his drawings in which he was depicted killing nine great leaders, maybe it‟s not such a good idea
to completely give up drawing.
Among the Brazilian‟s fierce enemies at the time were Pope Benedict XVI, George W.
Bush, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain.
The exhibition caused a huge worldwide scandal and had plenty of organizations request
the immediate elimination of the paintings on the grounds that they were encouraging violence
towards authorities.
Even painting can be taken into consideration if you follow the track of Chris Ofili and
his canvas, The Holy Virgin Mary. The painting depicting a super-sized black Madonna covered
in elephant dung and pornographic collage became a hit in London, Berlin and New York
between 1997 and 2000.
Rudolph Giuliani, the mayor of New York himself, advertised it for free by going to the
media and calling it “a sick idea.”
And even sculpture can do the job when you outrage using a touch of humor, and think
like Maurizio Cattelan did when he created L.O.V.E., a huge Carrara marble hand giving the
middle finger, exposed for several months in front of the Milan Stock Exchange. Although at the
time its fierce objectors asked the authorities to remove the work due to the obscene message it
was conveying, it still remains an impressive piece of anti-capitalism protest. In his defense,
Cattelan says that his work is merely about “imagination and love” without any social message
behind.
Right. This smart guy is obviously aware of the tenth Strategy: create controversy, but
use every occasion to deny that your aim is to create shock or to raise a scandal.

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 “- If you could ask God one question what would you ask?
- Did you create me before I created you”?
REVEREND BILLY

Come on, don‟t be shy! Rest assured that God would not bring His wrath upon you. And
in exchange you might just get the press interested in making you famous.
Over the years, God, Muhammad, Jesus, the Quran, the Bible and the Torah were all
subjected to modern art interpretations. Many contemporary artists have attacked the church, its
symbols and its representatives.
They showed Pope John Paul II crushed dead by a meteorite at the time when he was, in
fact, ruling the Vatican.
They submerged a cross in urine and had it photographed.
They had our Savior Jesus‟s image tattooed on the back of stuffed pigs.
They reproduced Michelangelo‟s Pieta, showing the Virgin Mary as a rat holding the
infant.
They parodied Da Vinci‟s famous Last Supper, placing at the table characters taken from
Popeye the Sailor Man (with Olive as disciple John, believed by many to be Mary Magdalene).
They painted the Virgin Mary using elephant dung and pornographic collages.
They depicted the Prophet Muhammad as a wooden dog sitting in a roundabout in
Sweden.
They crucified Christ on a falling US bomber plane.
They exhibited small statues representing Jesus, the Virgin Mary and some other saints
inside blenders, meat grinders, frying pans, grills and toasters.
There‟s no shortage of choices, as you can see. There are a lot of themes and topics out
there for your art projects to interrogate or ridicule. And most of them can be found in the holy
books: the Bible, the Torah and the Quran. Just read and be dazed.
I find the idea of an infant born out of a virgin in the absence of sexual intercourse a
pretty damn good one.
The same goes for the complete lack of any form of historical documents that would
attest the existence of Jesus, as it is described in the New Testament.

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 And what about the creation of the world 5,000 years ago? Now that‟s a story that would
make even Santa Claus blush. You know, the one with Adam, Eve and a snake in the Garden of
Eden. Not to mention that guy, Jonah, who managed to stay alive for three days in a row inside a
large fish.
And the list is still open.

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 “I like the challenge of trying different things and wondering whether
it‟s going to work or whether I‟m going to fall flat on my face”.
JOHNNY DEPP

Erik Ravelo is a sculptor, painter, multimedia artist and creative director at FABRICA,
Benetton Group‟s communication research center. Born in Cuba, he fled to Argentina when he
was 18 and recently shocked people with his The Untouchables series.
His photo project draws attention to various forms of evil harming innocent children,
such as Vatican pedophilia, shootings in US schools, sexual tourism in Thailand, war in Syria,
organ trafficking and obesity in the Third World.
The artist chose to shock by creating a series of six photos showing six different children
crucified on the backs of different characters: a priest, a doctor, a soldier, a tourist, an armed
teenager or on Ronald McDonald‟s back.
His project sparked major controversy. With some folks considering the images
pornographic, it was even banned from Facebook. Ravelo defended himself, stating that he had
by no means the intention of being impudent and that all the characters he had taken pictures of
were some of his good friends and their children.

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 “Vision without execution is just hallucination”.
HENRY FORD

Anything related to sex, nudity and so-called inappropriate or extreme sexual acts
disturbs or even creates public outrage. All you have to do is figure out how to tackle the topic.
A bunch of naked men and women led by the artist Stuart Ringholt himself, also wearing
his birthday suit, on a tour through the Contemporary Art Museum in Sydney may get some
people to feel shocked but not enough to stir controversy. (The performance, entitled Power to
the People, was meant to ascertain if people react the same to art when naked.)
Not cool.
A much greater deal of “success” was granted to Cheng Li, a Chinese performance artist
who, in 2011, was sentenced to a year in a labor camp for his performance entitled Human
Rights, Contact, Art Whore. The performance involved him having sexual intercourse with a
woman in front of a large audience, both in the balcony and the basement of the Beijing
Contemporary Exhibition Hall.
Bingo!
A similar approach was taken 40 years ago, even if it was a bit tamed down.
The year was 1972, when a quite notable performance piece was shown at the Sonnabend
Gallery in New York. American artist Vito Acconci hid under the gallery‟s floor and performed
eight hours of daily masturbation for three weeks.
The visitors could hear his moaning and whispers, amplified through big speakers:
“You‟re pushing your cunt down on my mouth...”
The action was intended as a protest against the paranoia taking over America during the
Nixon regime.

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 “The behaviors of racial identity are very animal because we are
animals”.
SANTIAGO SIERRA

Not even Santiago Sierra‟s work, Los Penetrados /The Penetrated, which consists of a set
of photos and a 45-minute video in eight acts exhibited at the Helga de Alvear gallery, isn‟t that
much of a shocking piece of art anymore.
The work, which Sierra said is a comment on the phenomenon of racism and
immigration, exposes a series of couples, 110 white and black bodies to be precise, penetrating
each other in all ways known to man.
The sexual acts are based on different possible combinations between the penetrator and
the penetrated: white male - white female, white male - white male, white male - black female,
white male - black male, black male - black female, black male - black male, black male - white
female and black male - white male.
The participants‟ faces were digitally blurred to further highlight the actors‟ modular
characters. And by placing a mirror at a certain angle behind the characters, the pairs and
perspectives were multiplied.

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 “Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor”.
TRUMAN CAPOTE

A 75X100 cm photo belonging to the Siberian contemporary art duo Viatcheslav Mizine
and Alexandre Chabourov, also known as the Blue Noses may be an answer.
Labeled as “pornographic” and “a shame brought upon Russia” in 2005 by the Russian
Minister of Culture at the time, the work was banned from being shown at a Paris exhibition.
Later on, in the spring of 2007, it was once again banned from the “Sots Art - Russian
Political Art from 1972 to today” exhibition, which only gave way to scandal and perfect media
coverage.
At this point you may be wondering, what‟s so scandalous about this photo?
The subject is very simple: two Russian policemen, in uniforms, helmets on, are
experiencing a beautiful love affair while kissing passionately, in the middle of the winter, in a
desolate Siberian forest...
I‟m sure that the same success would‟ve been achieved by replacing the two characters
with two Orthodox priests, two Buddhist monks, two secret service chiefs or two famous
politicians.
In his Unhate project, awarded the Grand Prix at the 2012 Cannes Lions Festival, Eric
Ravelo presents a set of photos featuring passionate kisses between world political and religious
leaders. In most of the situations, we‟re dealing with affirmed enemies. Ok, it‟s an advertising
campaign, but who cares? It‟s just the same in art.
Generally speaking, it‟s love stories between TWO MEN that shock.
If you show two women in an artwork, whichever sexual stance they are in, it looks like
it‟s not going to raise eyebrows anymore. Unless of course the two ladies are Angela Merkel and
Madonna :)

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 “God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough
blood supply to run both at the same time”.
ROBIN WILLIAMS

Hot situations involving men are very hip in art right now.
And if we‟re talking about shocking art, penises are eons ahead of the female
reproductive organs.
Here‟s an example. Between October 19, 2012 and January 28, 2013, at the Leopold
Museum in Vienna, was held the Nackte Maenner exhibition - a retrospective dedicated to male
nudity in art. (Later on the exhibition went to Paris and the consequences were the same.)
To promote the exhibition, the organizers displayed a work belonging to Pierre Et Gilles
(Pierre and Gilles), called Vive la France all over town. The poster shows three males of three
different races impersonating three soccer players with the ball at their feet, wearing only boots
and leggings.
Following public threats and vandalizing acts on the posters, the Leopold Museum
decided to cover the characters‟ penises with a red stripe.
That‟s really shocking!

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 “I like people who shake other people up and make them feel
uncomfortable”.
JIM MORRISON

It‟s not only sex between people of the same gender that is viewed as shocking, even if
we‟re dealing with two men, but also sex with animals, bestiality or zoophilia.
Oleg Kulik has demonstrated this in his set of photos entitled Family of the Future,
depicting naked grown-up men while being kissed or even sodomized by large pure-breed dogs.
In October 2008, in Paris, the French Police confiscated about thirty of Kulik‟s works,
considering them pornographic. The art world claims they‟re art, though.
“A man is an animal first of all, said Kulik. And then he is a Social animal, Political
animal and so on. I am an Art animal, that‟s why, spectator, I need your physical and
psychological efforts to make sense.”
I believe any kind of zoophilic-themed approach as an artistic act is worth a try, if you
want to make people feel shocked.
It will definitely draw attention. The more profound and contextual the idea is, and the
more provocative the approach is, the more successful the project will turn out in the end.
Saiman Chow, a New York artist born in Hong Kong, seems to have figured this out and
keeps on drawing men and women kissing foxes, cats or goats :)

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61
“The idea according to which you can‟t look at a naked child other than
with evil intentions is absolutely abhorrent”.
GRAHAM OVENDEN

Then you can try an artistic approach to the relationship between kids and sexuality. Or,
you can try an even more shocking approach: kids, animals and sexuality.
You‟re going to enjoy a guaranteed media coverage and with it, international recognition.
But be careful, my friend! Not so long ago, the Supreme Court in Truro, a small place in
the South West of England, found Graham Ovenden guilty of indecent assault against children.
During the trial, Graham Ovenden denied all charges and defended himself by claiming
that the representations of naked children were just his personal manner of exploring the “state of
grace.”
Most of his portraits are inspired by Lewis Carroll‟s “Alice in Wonderland” and
Vladimir Nabokov‟s scandalous “Lolita,” a novel with a controversial subject, about a grown-up
man who becomes sexually involved with a 12 year old girl.
Conclusion: the visual always raises more concerns. Wyatt Neumann, an American
photographer, found out about this on his own. He took nude photos of his daughter and
uploaded them onto his social networks, until all his accounts got blocked. The scandal got an
American gallery to notice him and to exhibit his works, and to launch a moral debate: Porn or
art? Abuse of rights or freedom of expression? Nudity: shameful or natural?
Boom!

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 “I love to do the things the censors won‟t pass”.
MARILYN MONROE

Irina Ionesco is a Romanian-born photographer. She was born in Constanta, in 1935, and,
at a certain point, immigrated to Paris together with her parents. Nobody had a clue who she was
in the capital of France until the 1970s, when the eccentric artist published a series of black and
white photos of her daughter, Eva, only 4 year old at the time, posing in explicit erotic situations.
Again, the topic of morality in art was brought up. Some critics praised the photos,
considering them works of art of a matchless genius, images in perfect balance between
immaculate beauty and contrived eroticism. Unsurprisingly, most of them described the photos
as child pornography of the lowest kind.

Fact is, everyone found them shocking in one way or another.

In spite of controversy, Ionesco minded her own business, apparently ignoring both
critics who praised her and the ones tearing her to shreds. She kept on taking photos for fashion
magazines, art galleries and her personal collection. She also kept on shooting pictures of her
daughter and also of mature women.
But Eva became a grown-up woman and a successful artist who one day, sued her
mother.

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 Boom! Another scandal!
During the trial, which she finally won, Eva declared in front of the jury that she
considered herself abused and also stated that her mother “had stolen her childhood.” In 1998,
the French police collected from Irina‟s apartment hundreds of explicit photos showcasing her 5
year old naked daughter Eva.
Total shock with minimum investment!
Also with minimum investment, but with a lot of guts, Leigh Ledare managed to get
noticed. The American photographer, born in 1976, is worldwide famous and considered to be a
pioneer in taboo-breaking, thanks to the idea he had, and that was taking pornographic photos of
his mother.
I did some research on this topic because if I expected anything coming from an artist,
the profile of such a mother really got me curious to find out more about her. That is because she
poses for her son naked, masturbating or having sex with a man the same age as her son. I found
out her name is Tina Peterson. As a teenager, she was a particularly talented ballerina, a so-
called prodigy kid, but for various reasons she had to give up her career prematurely.
For seven years, Leigh has been photographing his mother in her most intimate acts and
attitudes, exploiting her boundless need for recognition.
Recognition that both eventually gained, we have to admit it.

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 “We have art in order not die of the truth”.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

They say one well-informed man is worth two. In art, I‟d say one well-informed man is
worth a thousand, and that‟s because contemporary artists who tackle present socio-political
themes soon get worldwide fame and all the good that comes with it.
It‟s also the case of Swiss artist Gianni Motti who, in 2005, created a soap bar measuring
1.80 cm X 8.20 cm X 4.90 cm, which he claimed was made out of Italian Prime Minister Silvio
Berlusconi‟s fat. Thing is that Berlusconi had a liposuction operation performed just a couple of
months before.

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 Motti gave to the work the name Mani Pulite/Clean Hands, as a reference to an anti-
corruption campaign of the 1990s.
No need to tell you the work shocked the hell out of everybody. And when asked about
the origin of his “raw material,” the artist declared that an employee of the Swiss clinic where the
surgery took place provided him with the fat. Of course, the clinic denied this allegation.
A regular looking soap at first glance, the work was sold to a private collector in 2005 for
€15,000, and later on was exhibited at the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art in Zurich.
If you want to become a name in contemporary art, you have to read and be up-to-date
with everything.
Watch news on TV or Internet, read blogs, and stay tuned for news about national and
world problems.
In 2005, after the infamous Abu Ghraib torture cases came to public attention, the same
Gianni Motti showed up in the VIP section of the Roland Garros stadium for the semifinal
between Tim Henman and Guillermo Coria. That coincided with President Bush‟s visit to
France for the 60th anniversary of D-Day and the Invasion of Normandy.
TV cameras caught him seated for the first 20 minutes of the match, with a paper bag on
his head, as a pacifist protest against the Abu Ghraib tortures, until the stadium‟s security noticed
his presence and removed him from the facilities.
It seems that Motti is one of the artists who clearly understood this fifth Strategy.
In 1997, during the 53rd session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, Motti
found out that the Indonesian delegate was missing for some reason. So he took his place and,
taking advantage of his new status, stated the country‟s position on ethnic minorities‟ rights
defense.
Still 1997. He travelled to Columbia and declared in front of the media that he was going
to force President Samper‟s resignation telepathically, but had to leave the country after
receiving a lot of threats.

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“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others”.
GEORGE ORWELL, ANIMAL FARM

There are very few successful contemporary artists out there who haven‟t made or aren‟t
making use of animals in their works.
The material is virtually unlimited. You can use wild or domestic beasts, alive or dead,
stuffed or preserved in formaldehyde, in one piece or dismembered, made of wax, bronze,
plastic, marble or any other materials, photographed, drawn, painted or sculpted. Anything goes.
Moreover, animals are very suitable subjects for installations, performances, interventions and
other acts of art.

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 I‟m really not sure there‟s actually a species missing from this picture: dogs, cats, horses,
squirrels, pigeons, hens, elephants, fish, coyotes, wolves, deer, pigs, cows, sheep, flies, ants,
snails, turtles, toads, rats, earthworms, and the list could go on forever.
Fact is you can use any animal on God‟s green earth to get your idea noticed.
But this doesn‟t necessarily mean that any work involving animals is a shocker. Some
spend their lifetimes painting cuddly puppies, fluffy cats, lusciously feathered birds or purebred
horses and nobody gives a damn. Not even animal rights organizations such as PETA or RSPCA.
Don‟t forget: what‟s important is the idea behind your work. The animal you choose will
only be a pretext. It will be there only to help you complete your idea.
This is why, in the following paragraphs, I‟m only going to talk about some artists‟
provocative ideas, and about how they‟ve used animals to make their projects remarkable.

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 “The idea is more important than the object”.
DAMIEN HIRST

The undeniable champion of animal usage in contemporary art is the British Damien
Hirst, the wealthiest artist of the moment. If all his works were to be gathered together in one
single exhibition, at first you‟d think yourself inside a natural history museum, not in a
contemporary art one.
Hirst‟s basic idea, the one that actually made him famous, was the exploration of themes
such as death and spirituality. For instance, to make a point on the fragile lives of butterflies, he
collected hundreds of large ones, as colorful as they get, torn their wings off and used those to
create splendid stained-glass windows.
Afterwards, he created, one after another, artworks consisting of large glass,
formaldehyde-filled, terrariums, in which he immersed a few dead domestic or wild animals,
sometimes having been dissected beforehand.
He triggered a scandal with his art installation called In and Out of Love, shown at Tate
Modern at the beginning of 2012. The installation was comprised of two windowless rooms with
white walls, full of live butterflies. In addition, Hirst‟s exhibition included some other paintings
and stained-glass windows and occupied an entire floor of the museum.
Enjoying wide press coverage, Hirst‟s retrospective at Tate shocked people all over the
world after it emerged that more than 9.000 butterflies died as part of his In and Out of Love
installation. Needless to add that PETA and other animal rights organization got enraged once
again.
Good job, Damien!

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 “All men are equal before fish”.
HERBERT HOOVER

Even if Damien Hirst is the most prolific artisan in using fauna, there are also other artists
who got themselves in the spotlight by making use of animals in their works.
In February 2000, at the Trapholt gallery in Kolding and then in 2006, slightly modified,
at the Kunstraum Dornbirn in Austria, a Danish artist of Chilean origins, named Marco Evaristti,
who had not been on the radar up to then, created an installation called Helena.
Despite its candid name, Helena consisted of 10 Moulinex Optiblend mixers filled with
clear water, tidily placed on an ordinary kitchen table. A goldfish was swimming in each of
these. The mixers were visibly plugged in and thus ready to use.
The visitors were invited to push the buttons and turn on the blenders, if they wanted to.
At least one did, according to the BBC, killing two fish.
The cops rushed in and managed to save the other fish and take them to the vet. As usual,
animal rights activists got really pissed off and sued the gallery where the installation was
exhibited.
The very idea of charging someone with “accessory to fish murder,” seems to me like an
act of art on its own. The fact is that Evaristti became famous overnight. He defended himself
against the accusations saying that he wanted to show how thin the line between existence and
death is, emphasizing the importance of people taking responsibility for their actions.
His idea was to confront people with a dilemma: choosing between life and death for
someone else. “It was a protest against what‟s going on in the world, against this cynicism, this
brutality that impregnates the world in which we live,” he said.
In court, a Danish judge decided that fish weren‟t subject of animal cruelty, pleading that
their death took place instantaneously and, actually, with a dose of “humanity.”
In 2011, Evaristti came back with another fish-themed installation, this time called
Forgive me, Helena, in which the goldfish were not in any immediate danger, but swimming
unhindered in an aquarium in which pages from the Torah, Bible and Quran were slowly
dissolving in the water.
But this is already another story.

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 “Sometimes not getting what you want is a brilliant stroke of luck”.
LORII MYERS

Out of all the animals on our planet, it seems that cats have most often incited
contemporary artists to cruelty, in their desire to scandalize. And since any kind of violence
instantly grabs press‟ attention, their actions have been thrashed out by mass media.
On the International Labor Day in 2007, the revolutionary group of Russian artists Voina
put on a project most Russians despised. The group members went into a McDonald‟s restaurant
in Moscow and threw live cats at the unsuspecting employees, taking the poor bastards by
surprise.
Pyotr Verzilov, one of the founders of Voina, was arrested but charges against him were
eventually dropped.
Despite using dead animals in her works, mainly in performances, few people had heard
about the Dutch artist Tinkebell before she broke her depressed cat‟s neck and turned it into a
handbag. The artist told the press that her cat Pinkeltje was depressed to the point where it could
no longer be left at home unattended.
As expected, the artist has received thousands of pieces of hate mail (which she has
compiled into a book titled “Dearest Tinkebell”), mostly from pet owners disapproving her
decision to kill the cat with her bare hands when she thought it was depressed, instead of taking
it to be humanely euthanized.
Not even Belgian artist Jan Fabre, who over 30 years ago was burning money to write
MONEY with the resulting ash and who named his street after him and placed a memorial
plaque on his parents‟ house writing “Here lives and creates Jan Fabre,” hasn‟t shown more
kindness towards felines.
In 2012, during a film shoot in Antwerp City Hall, he put on a performance that involved
throwing living cats repeatedly several meters spinning into the air, after which they made a hard
landing on what appeared to be some bumpy steps.
As a consequence, the Belgian has received over 20.000 e-mails slamming his act, and
has also been attacked seven times by old men carrying clubs whilst out jogging in the park and
been forced to move house a few times.
The guy has had his fair share of suffering, but this scandal made him famous.

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 “If at first you don‟t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried”.
STEVEN WRIGHT

The action of Guillermo Vargas, aka Habacuc, an artist from Costa Rica, made it to the
news all over the planet.
This guy used the shock value of his performance to stir up controversy. He tied a stray
dog to a gallery wall and claimed he would have it starved to death. This was Habacuc‟s way of
protesting against the people‟s hypocrisy– they brag about how much they love and care about
dogs, then they let them starve to death in the streets.
He noted that no one tried to free the dog, give it food, call the cops or do anything to
save the poor animal.
Later on it has been discovered that the artist didn‟t actually have cruel intentions towards
the animal, only exposing it for three hours a day to test the public‟s reactions to suffering. He
also stated that the dog was well-fed in secret. Over one million people have signed the petition
to stop the artist from finishing the project.
Habacuc‟s performance piece gained instant attention all over the map.
This happened to Tom Otterness, too. He is a famous sculptor, mainly known for his
kitsch bronze statues placed in several New York parks and subway stations. However, he got
his share of awareness in 1977 when he created a film (Shot Dog Film) in which he shot and
killed a dog from an animal shelter.

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 “Horror is beyond the reach of psychology”.
THEODOR W. ADORNO

In 2009, Algerian Adel Abdessemed created a one minute and a half video, named Usine,
in which he showed a variety of animals - from cocks, white mice and pit bulldogs to snakes,
tarantulas, iguanas and scorpions - all of them grouped together in a pen to fend for their lives.
Whether the animals are shredding each other to tiny bits or ignoring what happens around them
-the video is strange, unsettling, disturbing and shocking. To many, even to the eyes of the most
informed public, the whole thing seemed to be nothing short of foolish animal abuse. It hardly
matters what the artist‟s intention actually was.

One year before, the same artist produced an equally cruel video, showing some animals -
a pig, goat, deer, ox, horse and sheep - being bludgeoned to death in front of a brick wall. The
video should have been included in a one-person show called Don‟t Trust Me at the San
Francisco Institute, but the organization cancelled it citing threats of violence by animal rights
activists. However the video can easily be found on the Internet (with two or three clicks).

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 At the beginning of 2012, artist Amber Hansen originally planned to display coops of
chickens at locations across Lawrence, Kansas, where volunteers would care for them. A kind-
hearted action, you would say. But the birds would later be publicly slaughtered by a local
butcher and served as a meal for everyone.
“By building a relationship with the birds, the project will transform the contemporary
view of chickens as being merely 'livestock' to the beautiful and unique creatures they are, while
promoting alternative and healthy processes of caring for them,” wrote Hansen on her website,
explaining the idea behind her action.
Yet the art project was banned, as local authorities decided it would amount to animal
cruelty, and could lead to a fine of up to $1.000 or six months in jail.
As a way of protesting against the consumerist society we live in, in a 2010 artwork
called Corpor Esurit, or We All Deserve a Break Today, artist Elizabeth Demaray placed a large
number of red ants in a sealed Plexiglas box packed with pebbles. For one month, the ants were
fed only with McDonald‟s Happy Meals. The result was pretty much obvious for anybody who
has an idea about what ants would normally eat. By the time the exhibition was about to end,
most of the ants were no longer with us.

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 “Shock is still fun. I won‟t ever shut the door on it”.
NICHOLAS CAGE

Some contemporary artists turn to deliberate cruelty, violence or extreme acts against
animals in their works, with the hope that the public‟s massive negative emotions will make
them famous. Wrong move, my friend!
Whatever the idea behind an art project may be, I don‟t think this is an appropriate
approach. Performances such as Habacuc‟s with the dog - if he really left the animal to starve to
death-, or Adel Abdessemed‟s animal videos do nothing but enrage, disgust and totally chase
away the public.
Your awareness as an artist will last shorter than a passing fancy.
Use animals, by all means, knock yourself out, but convey your shocking, controversial
message using their qualities, beauty, wisdom or power. Don‟t torture them. Don‟t make them
suffer. They‟re living creatures just like us humans.
Remember Oleg Kulik. He used the idea of a dog to protest against a sick society when
he went crawling naked, on all fours, on a leash, barking and biting visitors in front of art
galleries.
Think about Joseph Beuys and his performance, I Like America and America Likes Me.
For it, the artist spent three days locked in a cage, next to a wild coyote captured in the Texas
desert. He was protesting against the way Indians had been treated for hundreds of years, during
the European colonization of the Americas.
Think about the famous Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari, who became famous after he had
Jesus Christ crucified on a „cross‟ formed by a miniature US fighter jet, as symbolic protest
against the War in Vietnam. Also remember his performance in which thousands of live
earthworms invaded a scale model of the White House.
Think about the internationally famous urban artist Banksy, who in 2006 covered an
Indian elephant in pink and gold biodegradable paint, to signify the general population‟s refusal
to recognize poverty.
All of these are truly remarkable ideas that show you how to get people‟s attention and
make them feel shocked by using animals in your projects.

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 “Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement”.
GEORGE MOORE

Out of all qualities a work of art possesses, humor is certainly the first to make the public
click. People tend to forgive and become more tolerant when confronted with a scandalous
artwork, even if it might not be to their taste, if humor is used as an artistic strategy.
Let‟s think about Cloaca. Cloaca is the work of a famous Belgian artist, Wim Delvoye.
In fact it is a gigantic contraption of almost 12 meters long and 3 meters high, which produces
poo.
Yes, we‟re dealing with a large installation, comprising a series of machines that replicate
the entire human digestive tract: mouth, esophagus, stomach, duodenum, intestines, liver,
pancreas and eventually the rectum and anus.
This scatological type of humor, even if it leads to shock, seems to attract the public.
Especially because Delvoye also created a logo, clearly mocking the Coca-Cola logo that he
applies onto some small jars containing the realistically smelling output he sells to enthusiasts.
Despite this, he is by no means the founding father of this genre.

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 Let‟s take a moment and remember what Manzoni did in the year of grace 1961. He
created cans filled with his own, personal poo. He labeled them Artist‟s Shit (Merda d‟artista)
and sold them for the price of their equivalent weight in gold (90 cans, 30 grams each).
Chilean artist Marco Evaristti also started a scandal when he exhibited his own feces,
encased in gold and decorated with real diamonds.
Along the same lines performed Santiago Sierra. His exhibit -21 huge blocks of human
feces, measuring 215X75X30 cm, collected by low-caste scavengers in New Delhi and Jaipur,
India- was shown at the Lisson Gallery in London.
If scatological humor is sometimes known to backfire, because, let‟s face it, the theme
can prove difficult to approach, scandalous political satire is always a massive turn-on for the
public. The more scandalous is the performance, the bigger the success. This type of art, though,
seems to be more successful in countries with totalitarian or semi-totalitarian regimes, like
Russia.
The image of a huge white penis painted on the Liteiny Bridge, right in front of the FSB
– KGB headquarters, spread like wildfire over the world media and Internet. The painting, which
pointed skyward whenever the bridge was raised, is the most notorious action of anarchist art-
group Voina (the Russian word for “war‟). The performance made the art-group worldwide
famous. So famous that Vladimir Putin, apparently a man with a rather sparse sense of humor, at
some point sent half of the group to jail.

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 “If they don‟t know what you‟re doin‟, Babe it must be art”.
U2

Voina members‟ claim to fame came after a series of scandalous and provocative
performances and art-pranks, which were used as means of protest against the totalitarian
regime‟s actions regarding racism or homophobia.
Through their continuous work to destroy repressive and patriarchal symbols and
ideologies, the group members of Voina want nothing but to poke and trigger reactions from the
Russian system.
They are that kind of genuine artists that even the great Banksy takes his hat off to. For
me, they‟re by far the best of the bunch. Beyond question.
Although combined with plenty of rage, all their actions carry serious amounts of humor.
In one of their very well-known provocative performances, they encouraged people to
engage in a sex party inside a museum. The moral? If people strip bare in a museum and visit it,
they won‟t start any trouble. But when they proceed to fornicate, we‟re dealing with a whole new
ballgame.
They put on yet another performance, one of the most provocative stunts to date, one that
was extremely shocking for any political regime in the world, no matter how democratic it
claimed to be. One night, they turned all the police cars in front of the Russian Ministry of
Internal Affairs upside-down. It was an act of protest against Russian police who still beats,
tortures and kills people unbothered.
Another example. During Moscow Days, they staged a mock public hanging of one gay
man, a Jew and three Asian immigrant workers inside the lighting department of the biggest
Auchan (department store) in the city.
The lynching stunt came as a response to mayor Luzhkov‟s repeated violations of human
rights. This performance was meant as a tribute to the five Russian revolutionaries hanged in
1826. That‟s why they called it Decembrists Commemoration/ In Memory of Decembrists – A
Present to Yuri Luzhkov.
With this action, they also wanted to remind Russians of the ideals of liberty the first
revolution in their country was all about.

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 “Anything can be art”.
MARCEL DUCHAMP

Dark humor is a powerful tool that shocks in contemporary art and brings immediate
awareness to those who know how to handle it properly.
David Shrigley, a Glasgow-based artist, stuffed a Jack Russell dog and placed a sign
declaring “I‟M DEAD” in his paws.
Piero Golia, a conceptual artist based in LA, created a bronze lion. Pretty small
otherwise, the lion apparently represented a regular sculpture, perfect to decorate a palace
staircase. What was inside the lion made the difference. I‟m talking about a pretty powerful
magnetic device, which jammed any other device using chip technology such as: credit cards,
mobile phones and even pacemakers.
The king of all animals, gentle on the outside, fierce on the inside!
With another installation, titled Faccio sul Serio (I Am Serious), the same Golia attempts
to convince his public of his work‟s seriousness. It is composed of individual 3D metal letters
that carry an electrical current. Touching the letters would cause death by electrocution.

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 “Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it”.
FRANK ZAPPA

Test: what was the dumbest thing that crossed your mind when you woke up this
morning?
Let‟s go through them in order. You wake up and your eyes fall on the fish tank your kids
gave you as a birthday present. There are not many plants inside the fairly bright space in which
a single goldfish is peacefully swimming. What is the dumbest thing you can think of? “What if I
give this little guy a new home, let‟s say a blender? How would it look inside it? And what if I
take it to a public place and leave it there? Would anybody press the button? Just for fun, you
know, or just to see what happens?”
This was probably Marco Evaristti‟s light bulb moment when he came up with Helena.
You then drag your sleepy ass downstairs for breakfast, to find your kids running around
and screaming their lungs out. What is the dumbest thing you can think of?
Hang them by their necks on a tree, like Maurizio Cattelan did with three puppets in the
exact likeness of children, in a public square in Milan, in 2004, making the outraged neighbors
spill into the streets? The scene was so realistic that a man came close to losing his life in his
desperate attempt to save the children.
From now on, whatever you do or whatever your eyes fall on, think about creating shock
by choosing the dumbest idea that crosses your mind at the moment.

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 “Everyone‟s an artist”.
JOSEPH BEUYS

In 1999, Tracey Emin got up from her bed one morning (after she had lain in it for
several days due to depression brought on by some bad love affair, she claims), and on her way
to the toilet turned her head to see: rumpled and filthy bed sheets, with sperm stains all over
them, a pair of knickers with menstrual period stains, empty vodka bottles, crumpled cigarette
packs, discarded condoms and a pair of slippers, other detritus and everyday objects.
What was the dumbest thing she thought of? To take this whole disgusting “tableau,”
meaning the bed and everything surrounding it, to the Tate Gallery in London and have it
exhibited with the title My Bed.
This exhibit brought her fame and made Emin well-known by the public. Now, she is a
Royal Academician, Professor at London‟s Royal Academy of Arts, and in 2013 she was
awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) by Her Majesty
The Queen for services to the arts.
The British collector Charles Saatchi initially bought the My Bed installation for
£150.000. When auctioned by Christie‟s a few months ago, the piece was sold for €2.8 million.

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 “It‟s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them
up to date”.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

As certain as leaves falling in autumn, there aren‟t many out there happy to be friends
with Marco Evaristti, the guy I‟ve been telling you about. I‟m not only referring to goldfish, but
humans as well. And you‟re probably wondering why.
Born in the same year as Tracey Emin, in 1963, Marco is for sure the most controversial
and extravagant, if not the most important, Danish contemporary artist. Some time back he had
the idea of organizing a happening, one at least weird in my opinion. And that‟s me being gentle.
Think about: what‟s the dumbest, most shocking idea you can come up with when you
think about food?
He came up with this one: on a sunny day in 2007, he mixed veal with pieces of fat from
his own hips, extracted by liposuction. He added potatoes, carrots, onion, garlic, two eggs,
thyme, tarragon, salt, pepper and 2-3 slices of bread.
He mixed everything thoroughly and produced 48 meatballs that were placed in tin cans
with his face on the label.
Then, he exhibited them in Santiago‟s Animal Gallery and, on the night of the big
opening, he invited his friends to eat the meatballs with a serving of pasta.
“Bon appetite,” said Evaristti, a glass of red wine in his hand. The claimed purpose of his
action was to protest against todays‟ plastic surgery frenzy.
Shortly after starting this scandal, Marco sold the first two cans for $23,200 each, and
claimed that the meatballs were not only delicious, but also contained less fat than supermarket
meatballs.

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 “I always want people to be confused, to be shocked or realize
something later”.
AI WEIWEI

Give this a thought: if you‟re living in a gigantic city like London, New York or Paris,
what‟s the dumbest thing that comes up in that head of yours while commuting to work, early in
the morning, squashed inside a subway? Or in the afternoon, while trying to cope with the human
traffic jam on the sidewalk?
Andrei Cadere was a conceptual artist born, like Brancusi, in Romania. About half a
century ago, he created The Barres, a handmade series of round wooden bars, some long sticks
supposed to be at the same time paintings, sculptures and unconventional interventions inside
institutional art spaces (art galleries, museums).
Cadere would always carry one of his sticks on his walks around town, bumping into
strangers or into the audience while visiting other people‟s shows or exhibitions, even when not
invited.
As a matter of fact, every single time you see or do something banal, some day day-to-
day stuff, ask yourself:
What’s the dumbest thing I could do, art-wise, with this object or this situation as a
starting point?
You have to walk a few blocks to get to that big meeting of yours, you‟re late and you
can‟t cross the street, even if the pedestrian light is green. Damn! Shit! Fuck! You mumble as
you look at the traffic jam in despair. A cop is directing the traffic and has obviously managed to
jam it.
What‟s the dumbest thing I can do starting from this circumstance? This is how you
should see things.
Wearing an authentic Bulgarian police uniform (with the word “ПОЛИЦИЯ” –
Bulgarian word for police - displayed on it), Ivan Moudov, a young Bulgarian contemporary
artist directed, by his own rules, the traffic in the quiet town of Graz, Austria. I‟m sure you can
imagine the resulting muddle for yourself… It was only then that the real Graz policemen
eventually stopped him.
A video of the performance was shown in 2002, at Manifesta 4 gallery in Frankfurt. It
enjoyed a great deal of success and granted Moudov international recognition.

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 “Art should astonish, transmute, and transfix. One must work at the
tissue between truth and paranoia”.
BRETT WHITELEY

Do you want some more ideas that are both stupid and shocking? Albeit scandalous, but
finally brilliant through the message they convey? (Unfortunately for you, dear artist reading this
book, these ideas have already been done.)
Are mountain peaks a bit too white? Hell, what would they look like in pink?
Questionable service hidden behind too much marketing in 4 or 5 star hotels? Take this:
lipstick marks made not with the lips, but with the exact opposite body part, Anal Kisses, on
those hotels‟ posh stationeries.
Too many CV-s and letters of intent coming from youngsters in response to employment
ads? Go ahead and send letters to hiring companies expressing your REFUSAL to work in their
open positions. Of course, mention also the reasons that led to your decision.
Too many legends about the use of dog meat in Chinese restaurants? Pretend you‟re the
owner of an Asian restaurant and send 1,500 letters to dog shelters everywhere, asking them to
provide you, in exchange for cash, live animals for you to cook and sell to your hungry
customers.
Of course, in all these cases, the authors let the press know and everything went public.
And the results came quickly.

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 “It was the job of art to bring true feelings alive. To shock people into
awareness”.
MICHAEL CRICHTON

Are you dealing with a bad case of “thinker‟s block?” Do you want me to hand you out
original ideas, as shocking as the ones you‟ve just read about?
Stuff that has never been done before? Ideas that may help you get noticed? That can
pave your way to fame?
Unfortunately, in this book I can‟t supply you with ideas, because it would be silly. I‟m
only showing you general directions. Tangible ideas are not to be delivered by the bulk. This is
not a fish market. One idea doesn‟t fit all.
Give it a thought: how do you think My Bed would‟ve worked if made by Damien Hirst?
Or Cloaca, if created by Sophie Calle? How about Voina members‟ actions performed by
Spencer Tunick or Milo Moire‟s performances put on by Tinkebell?
One idea good for one artist doesn‟t work for another.
Ideas are essentially related to each artist‟s background, life, gender, age, birthplace,
experiences, parents, relatives, childhood, school, education and social, economic and political
situation in the region the artist lives in.
They are related to whatever one feels he can master like a pro. Some may want to draw
or simply drawing fits them more, while others perform in photography, some in video, others in
sculpture, performances, installations and so on.
You choose!

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“There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to
have their understanding shocked and insulted”.
CARL SANDBURG

Just like racism, humiliation of one‟s own kind, modern slavery, sexual intolerance and
the Holocaust.
Whatever tackles the Holocaust, works. Provocateurs have sniffed the controversy-
creating potential of this painful topic in history and have turned it to their advantage.
A first example: the same Marco Evaristti, the eternal provocateur, who created
Rolexgate, a sculpture he says is commemorating the horrors of the Auschwitz Nazi Camp.
The otherwise small sculpture represents the entrance gate to the camp and, in order to
make it, the artist used enamel and gold fillings from teeth that he bought in Austria from a
person who claimed that they came from the Nazi death camp. The exhibition also included a set
of rails and a train carriage in white gold with 11k diamonds. In the carriage, skulls made of red
gold are looking out of the window.
Of course the artist could not confirm the certainty of the vendor‟s claim, but says that his
intention was to relate all the atrocities of the world, which many tend to forget.
Another artist who has tackled the Holocaust theme is Santiago Sierra. In his huge 245
cubic meters performance, he turned an old German synagogue into a gas chamber, replacing the
deadly Zyklon B gas with carbon monoxide. He then invited visitors in, wearing gas masks.
According to him, the performance was meant as a protest against the trivialization of the
Holocaust.
And there are other artists who have tapped into the Holocaust theme, too. Tom Sachs
has created a model of a concentration camp, made solely from a deconstructed Prada box and
Zyklon B candies colored like Chanel and Hermes labels are, to stigmatize the “links between
fashion and fascism.”
Zbigniew Libera has built a model of a concentration camp using Lego bricks. To further
extend the scandal, Libera has also made a very life-like LEGO packaging for it and included a
small note on the box writing “sponsored by LEGO Systems.” LEGO insisted they had nothing
to do with the project and stated that they had just offered the artist the bricks for free, without
knowing what his project was all about.

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 “Once artists are expected to shock, it‟s that much harder from them to
do so”.
JERRY SALTZ

Racism, humiliation of one‟s own kind, sexual intolerance and modern slavery prove to
be equally profitable themes for a shock-seeking artist.
Take a look at Santiago Sierra. Now that‟s a real political artist. Through his projects,
Sierra criticizes a sick capitalist system, in which work and exploitation are closely linked.
He uses immigrants and poor population in his performances. For ridiculous sums of
money, these people perform stupid, absurd, Sisyphean tasks, such as to roll an immense boulder
from point A to point B, and then back.
Or they just have to stay and accept whatever it is that‟s going to happen to them. No
protests. Again, for small sums of money, less than any decent payment. Those who accept are
always the immigrants, accustomed with day labor, or extremely poor people.
Peruvians accepted to have their photographs taken for €15. Prostitutes addicted to heroin
gave their consent to have a continuous thin, 160 centimeters long, line tattooed on their backs in
return for the price of one heroin shot.
In 2001, during the Venice Biennial, 200 African, Asian and Eastern-European illegal
immigrants living in Italy, were asked to agree to have their hair dyed blond. The only condition
was to be naturally dark-haired. Those 200 people were paid some $60.
Poverty-stricken and being accustomed to permanent humiliation, people will willingly
take part in any game they‟re invited to join.
Think of doing something in this direction yourself. An action that doesn‟t necessarily
resemble socio-political aspects like the ones I‟ve mentioned, but one that may also tap into other
areas of day-to-day life.
See the case of Marianne Maric, a French artist who was basically unknown a couple of
years ago, when she launched her Lamp Girls project, a series of photos showing a performance
in which fashion models were posing as pipes for a few lampshades. In fact, simple household
appliances.
Have you come up with an idea already?

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 “An artist cannot speak about his art more than a plant can discuss
horticulture”.
JEAN COCTEAU

You will never hear these words come out of an artist‟s mouth: “Yes, I did this to have
people shocked so that I may create a huge scandal that will make me famous”.
Artists usually keep their true intentions to themselves. I advise you to do the same.

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 This makes sense because people are not after those with an insatiable desire for outrage.
On the other hand, they are willing to listen to those who see realities, things or ideas differently.
They tend to be compassionate towards those forced into a corner, towards the defeated or the
misunderstood.
When you take pictures of one thousand naked people in downtown Madrid, say:
“This river of people is my way of describing progress from a cultural standpoint”.
You shall by no means tell people:
“I‟m going to make the news again tonight with this idea that made me famous, and I
will keep on enraging all conservative, purist and bigoted families across the globe”.
Because we‟re talking about shock-creating events, TV channels will be covering your
action. Every time, they will see it as an occasion to improve their ratings. Big ratings equal big
advertising bucks, right? This is no longer news for anybody out there.
When you are a conceptual artist and start begging on the streets as a performance, have
the number of your passport burned into your back, invite someone from the audience to stab
you, put yourself in psychiatric confinement or get grass implanted into your back as well as dirt
and other unknown things surgically embedded into your body, as the Chinese artist Yang
Zhichao did, you will never say, “God, I don‟t know what else to do to have the press notice
me.” Instead, say “Through my artistic actions, I‟m trying to learn and create a dialogue about
my body, my country, the whole world and its limitations”.
Newspapers, TV stations and radio station all need crafty words - credible, meaningful
words to pack even the most shocking, foolish, dumb ideas you can think of.

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 “Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and
fame from this state of being”.
A.A. MILNE

There are virtually no boundaries on your way to getting famous. In the last twenty years
(mostly), the Chinese artists seem to have passed beyond any limit: cannibalism, self-mutilation
and use of extreme materials such as blood, human adipose tissue, live animals and bodies of
dead children.
It seems like it‟s getting tougher and tougher to find ideas and ways to shock.
About a hundred years ago, things were way simpler. Francis Picabia started a huge
scandal with his La Sainte Vierge (The Holy Virgin) drawing, which was, in fact, an ink blot on a
canvas.
Fifty years later, Michel Journiac, a seminary dropout, ignited the scandal with his
performance titled Messe pour un corps (Mass for a Body), in which he officiated as a fake priest
in a mock Catholic liturgical ceremony. The “communion sacrament” he served to those
attending his Mass for a Body was a sausage made by himself from his own blood.
Today, we tend to believe that nothing we do may get people to feel enraged enough
anymore. And still...

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 “No religion forbids cannibalism. Nor can I find any law, which
prevents us from eating people. I took advantage of the space between
morality and the law and based my work on it”.
ZHU YU

Not many artists with a place in art history can boast of several court trials and receiving
three prison terms for their work.
At 76, Austrian writer and composer Hermann Nitsch is the uncrowned king of ritualistic,
blood-drenched performance actions. We‟re talking about gallons of blood, sperm, urine, feces
and animal intestines. His religious, pornographic and grotesque works have been awing the art
world and crowds since the early 1960s.
To satirize everything that a religious ritual implies, his knack is to combine slaughtered
animals, red fruits, music, dancing and active participants. That‟s how Nitsch has created the
Orgien Mysterien Theater (which roughly translates as “The Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries” or
“The Orgiastic Mystery Theatre”).

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 Under this name, he has staged inside his castle a number of performances wherein
spectators were invited to take leave of their senses and become participants themselves, while
beautiful, young, smiling actors decked out all in white sacrificed animals and handled entrails,
blood and semen or eviscerated pigs, lambs and oxen.
Next to this, swans drank out of pools of blood, creating aesthetic tableaux beautifying
the horror of death. The whole ordeal finished with the eating of the animals at a feast
celebrating life.
In 1998 one last ritual performance of the kind was staged. That was exactly two years
before Chinese performance artist Zhu Yu (born in 1970), a Central Academy of Fine Arts
graduate and widely regarded as the most controversial and criticized artist in China, shocked the
entire world with his work Eating People.
Eating People is Zhu Yu‟s most famous and controversial piece of performance art in the
Infatuation of Injuries series. It has been presented for the first time at the Fuck Off art
exhibition, curated by Ai Weiwei and Feng Boyi in Shanghai in 2000, and consists of a series of
photographs showing him cooking and eating what is alleged to be a human fetus.
The artist claimed that all children he used in the series had been stolen from a medical
testing facility. His performance was also featured in the documentary Beijing Swings, which
was broadcasted by UK television Channel 4 back in 2003.

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 “It‟s important to use your body and your intellect (...) so you can stop
and face reality”.
HE YUNCHANG

Zhu Yu is not the only artist who chose to take art to the utmost bearable limit. Other
Chinese artists also score big in this regard.
He Yunchang (born in 1967) is a contemporary artist living and creating in Beijing. The
guy is famous for his art, which involves physical endurance testing and, most of the times, self-
mutilation and self-wounding.
For his 90-minute performance entitled Dialogue with the Water (1999), he hoisted
himself upside down by a crane above the Liang River in Yunnan, blood dripping from cuts in
his arms.
In 2009, he had one rib taken out of his chest by surgery, as part of another performance
act, suggestively called One Rib.
For One Meter of Democracy (2010), the artist asked 25 people to decide in a secret poll
mocking the “Chinese democracy” whether he should endure a one-meter-long cut made down
his right side, from just below the clavicle to his knee.

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 There were 12 votes in favor of the work and 10 against, with 3 abstentions, and He
Yunchang was subjected to the surgical incision without anesthetic in a live performance with
voters witnessing the whole scene. To make sure the world saw it all, a camera guy filmed and
photographed everything. I saw the resulting film and pictures. Watching the whole thing is hard
to endure. Forgetting it is even harder.
The artist said the performance was conceived as a physical demonstration of “the
tension between the individual and the state,” represented by the scalpel as well as the ballot
box.
He Yunchang‟s stunts often seem to be anything but art, but in fact, they reveal
themselves to be deeply analytical and highly referential works of art, which combine existential
thought and Chinese tradition with comments about contemporary society.
Sun Yuan (born in 1972) and Peng Yu (1974) are further examples of extremely
controversial Chinese contemporary artists. The two, who are also married to each other, live and
work in Beijing. Like Zhu Yu, the duo is also associated with the shock art movement and is
famous for using extreme mediums with their artwork. They have used materials such as human
fat tissue, live animals and bodies of dead children.
Their work deals with issues of perception, life and death as well as the human condition.
Just to make you see how far some people would go to shock, I‟m going to tell you a few
words about Body Link, a performance that took place at the Fuck Off exhibition in Shanghai in
2000.

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 In a few words, both artists exsanguinated 100cc of blood from their own bodies and
transfused it to the corpse of Siamese twin babies, a medical sample.
The artists performed the piece just after they decided to get married. The two conjoined
twins, who were facing each other, had no way of hiding from or avoiding each other, Sun Yuan
and Peng Yu said. In marriage, they would also have to face each other every day and walk
through life together.
As far as art critics are concerned, the duo‟s performance raised issues about the market
traffic in body parts, the spread of HIV-AIDS and hepatitis C through the selling of blood by
desperately poor people and the international medical tourism of those seeking organ transplants.

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 “Go as far as you can see and you will see further”.
ZIG ZIGLAR

In 2013, when he was only 22, Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama completely chopped off his
genitalia during a performance, then steam-cooked the severed penis, testicles and scrotal skin
and served them garnished with mushrooms and a pinch of parsley to his guests. He said the
dinner was designed to raise awareness about asexual people‟s rights.
In art, just as it happens in life too, anybody is free to do as he pleases, but for me this
type of performance is pure insanity. You really have to be fucking gaga to cut off your trouser
snake and coin purse and then claim you did it for artistic purposes. Anything goes, but self-
mutilation and putting your own life at risk. We are given just one life and I believe we should
rather dedicate our time to finding smarter ways of harnessing our ideas.
For example, even if it ranks high in the top of all-time shocking performances, I find
Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader‟s action unmistakably stupid. It led him to his death, when he was only
33 years old.

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 In 1975, he tried to cross the Atlantic in a pocket cruiser, setting sail from Cape Cod. His
performance was bombastically titled In Search of the Miraculous and, besides the boat
escapade, included a series of pictures with bland Los Angeles scenes.
Epilogue: His broken boat was found 150 miles off the coast of Ireland. It was empty.
The misfortunate artist had already vanished into the deep waters for eternity.
Chris Burden‟s performances seems to me as mind-boggling as Ader‟s. In 1971, during
the Vietnam War and with street revolts taking place in several cities across the US, he got a
friend to shoot him in the shoulder. With his wound healed, a few years later he went on to have
himself nailed to a Volkswagen.
It was not the first time a performance artist included a shocking element in his works. In
1974, Marina Abramovic, the self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art,” set fire to a
huge, 5 pointed star, similar to a communist star. And that‟s not all. She then cut off her nails and
hair and threw them into the flames. Wait, still not finished here. She then jumped straight into
the middle of the burning fire and passed out shortly afterward.
Fortunately, she was saved at the last moment and transported to the hospital, where she
recovered. Abramovic later commented upon this experience: “I was very angry because I
understood there is a physical limit. When you lose consciousness, you can‟t be present, you
can‟t perform.”
What did I tell you?

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 “Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still
considered an art”.
CARLOS RUIZ ZAFÓN

This is only up to you, my artist friend.

One thing is clear. To be remarkable, you must be different. You must bring something
strikingly new to the art game and courageously express what makes you stand out in a
straightforward manner.
However, I‟ve noticed from my experience that, although artists often feel the need of
differentiation, and although they, by all means, want to create shock so they can drag the public
opinion out of apathy, they end up adopting a conservative attitude. It‟s not hard to understand
why this is happening. And the trap of doing something familiar adds up to the fear of being
different: we are tempted to believe that we would be more appreciated if we delivered familiar
things to the public. And that‟s because, on a subconscious level, we perceive them as already
validated.
But the world would stop if we only chased already validated things, right? That‟s why I
advise you to be brave.
You could very well choose the way of extreme anti-system actions, like Pyotr
Pavlensky, Russian conceptualist artist and important political activist. A graduate of the Sankt
Petersburg Art and Industry Academy, he fights, much like all the Voina group members, against
the authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin‟s Russia.
His performances are of extreme violence. He nailed his scrotum to cobblestones in Red
Square, right under the nose of Lenin‟s mausoleum, as a protest against the apathy and political
indifference typical to Russian society.
He was left naked, wrapped in a multilayered barbed wire cocoon by his assistants, right
by the main entrance to the Legislative Assembly of Sankt Petersburg.
He sewed his own lips together as a protest against the arrest of punk rock group Pussy
Riot members.

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 “I try to bring to surface the deformed and misogynistic ideas about
vulva and menstruation”.
CASEY JENKINS

If you are a woman, you can choose to go for anti-discriminatory, social feminist actions.
Like Yoko Ono, Orlan or Casey Jenkins did.
In 1964, in a performance entitled Cut Piece, Yoko Ono kneeled on-stage at the Carnegie
Hall in New York, a pair of scissors in her hand, and invited the audience to come forward and
cut off any piece of her clothing. Albeit polite at first, in the end people left Yoko wearing
nothing but her underwear.
In her project that started in 1990, the French artist Orlan has had her face reconfigured
through cosmetic surgery procedures, in order to look like women depicted in classical works of
art, who are considered to be ideals of beauty.
Globally acknowledged as the first artist in the world to use plastic surgery as an artistic
medium in a performance, Orlan had her chin made to resemble Sandro Botticelli‟s Venus, her
lids altered to mirror the eyes of the Goddess Diana (as represented in a 16th century painting)
and her forehead transformed to bear a resemblance to the protruding brow of Da Vinci‟s Mona
Lisa. The artist defined her project as “a struggle against the innate.”
Another example of overflowing originality is Casey Jenkins, Australian artist and
“craftivist,” meaning an artist who combines craft making with activism as a new
communication medium. She co-founded and runs Craft Cartel, which aims to subvert and honor
art techniques often disparaged as “women‟s work.”
With her performance, Cunt Fling-Up – she crafted female genitalia attached to shoes
and flung them over power-lines in the manner gangs fling shoes- she has adorned the streets of
New York, London, Paris (the Eiffel tower has been on the list) and even the Vatican City‟s
Basilica.
And her most recent project, Casting off my womb, was a 28 day performance which
premiered at the Darwin Visual Arts Association (DVAA), between October and November
2013.
Sitting in a decent position on a wooden chest inside the gallery, she wasn‟t offering any
clues on what she had in store - unless one noticed she wasn‟t wearing any underwear. She just
sat there knitting a continuous, long scarf-like piece from wool inserted in her vaginal cavity, one
skein each day.
The performance piece lasted for 28 days, which is the length of an average menstrual
cycle.
As the event progressed, the artist‟s increasingly long masterpiece was hung from the
ceiling on wire hangers. With each day of the knitting‟s passing, Jenkins flicked over a manual
calendar to mark the number of days remaining until the piece was “cast off.”

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 With this performance, Jenkins says she tried to draw the warped and misogynistic views
about the vulva and menstruation into the open.

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 “Scandal is perhaps, most importantly, a sudden upheaval of our
world”.
STÉPHANE GUÉGAN

In the age of the Internet and speedy interactive communications, you can also opt for
new ways of expressing yourself through art, like Wafaa Bilal has done.
Born in 1966, Bilal is an Iraqi American visual artist, best known across the map for his
online interactive works, provoking dialogues about international politics and internal dynamics.
His work 3rdi (2010 - 2011) has its origin in the artist‟s concern with the communication
of public and private information to an audience, so that it may be retold and distributed. It is
also related to his need to recover his past, starting with the journey he made from Iraq to the US
a long time ago.
For this project, the artist had a titanium plate implanted in the back of his head, to which
a camera was temporarily attached. For one year, an image was captured once per minute in a
spontaneous and objective manner and streamed to a website for public consumption.
So, tell me, do you have any idea in this direction?

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 T.D. Hare is my name and it comes from The Dead Hare.
Yes, I am the dead hare that Joseph Beuys kept in his arms for 3 hours at the Schmela
gallery in Dusseldorf, during that famous performance which made it to art history as How to
Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Yes, that was I. It was 1965 and the performance happened
shortly after the moment when, being nearly 2 years old, I went to meet my maker. I‟m sure the
young crowd can‟t remember this.
Mr. Beuys seemed like a nice guy and everybody was calling him a remarkable, if not
brilliant artist, a true follower of the great Marcel Duchamp.
Personally, I found him a bit silly and scary on that day. The guy covered his face and his
hair with honey and gold leaves. A bit kitschy, but hey, it‟s a matter of personal taste here... plus,
he was having an appalling iron plate strapped to the bottom of his right shoe, which brought
back to me all sorts of bad memories of traps poachers used to make to catch and murder my
fellow hares. It was precisely the same type of device that ended my existence.
When it turns 2 years old, a hare is already considered a teenager, almost mature. So it
doesn‟t matter if I had already been dead 2 days before the artistic action took place, because I
clearly remember everything in detail. People who took part at the event could not know exactly
what Beuys was whispering into my long ears, because I was the only one privileged enough to
be accepted inside that chamber. The action taking place in the gallery could be watched from
outside, through a dusty door-window and a bigger window overseeing the street.
In this book, I was recounting all the learning the great artist taught me long ago. A lot of
useful tips I have gotten more and more grasp on over time, and which I am happy now to spread
to young artists all over the world.
This is my first book.

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 First of all, I thank Marcel Duchamp, without whom we wouldn‟t have surpassed the art
of the early 20th century. At least, not until now.
Thanks also to Joseph Beuys, who gave me the idea and without whom this project would
not have been possible.
Last but not least, thanks to all contemporary artists who, through their vivid imagination
and creativity, have inspired me to discover what I‟ve just shared with you in this book.

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 Now that you have finished The Gospel According to Duchamp/ 10 Shocking
Strategies To Becoming A Best Selling Artist please take a moment and review this book on
Amazon. Thank you so much!
Reviews are the best way readers discover great new books. Please consider telling your
friends or blog readers about my book. Your input will help make the next one even better.

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