Are Animal Snuff Films Art?

The Walter and McBean Galleries in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco are currently exhibiting an installation by Adel Abdessemed called "Don't Trust Me," which they apparently believe warrant support of the San Francisco Art Institute.

From the press release:

Don’t Trust Me portrays six animals—a sheep, a horse, an ox, a pig, a goat, and a doe—being struck and killed by a hammer. Each killing occurs so quickly that it’s difficult to determine definitively what has happened. Do these incidents represent slaughter or sacrifice? What are their social, cultural, moral, and political implications? Or are such questions now verging on irrelevance, as if something else altogether were taking place (or about to), something wholly other, unforeseen, unexpected?

If you can stomach it, read the rest of absurd press release--particularly the end:

SFAI’s exhibitions and public programs—a component of which is the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series—are supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Peter Norton Family Foundation, and the Grants for the Arts/San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional funding for the Visiting Artists and Scholars Lecture Series has been provided by Bob and Betty Klausner. Additional support for Adel Abdessemed’s exhibition, as well as for his Visiting Artists and Scholars lecture, has been provided by the Cultural Services of the French Consulate in San Francisco.

If you have any contacts at the above, please make use of them and express your disgust, outrage, and sadness.

You can call the gallery at 415-749-4563 and leave an articulate message of protest (and few people I know are able to do that without getting enraged, so perhaps a different medium is better), or you can e-mail them at exhibitions@sfai.edu. Of course, ask that the exhibit be removed immediately and that the galleries refrain from supporting such barbaric work in the future.

I have nothing else to say, other than this is one of those moments when I am ashamed to call myself an artist and a human being. If the videos were of our institutional uses of animals, there might be a lesson to be learned. The only lesson I learn here is just how low some people will plunge to garner attention, and just how ridiculous some PR people can be in their attempts to spin the depraved into the honorable.