Funferal

Art and terrorism

One of the stranger stories floating around the ‘net for the last few weeks has been the saga of Professor Steve Kurtz. As outlined on the Critical Art Ensemble website:

Early morning of May 11, Steve Kurtz awoke to find his wife, Hope, dead of a cardiac arrest. Kurtz called 911. The police arrived and, after stumbling across test tubes and petri dishes Kurtz was using in a current artwork, called in the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Kurtz was charged with a terrorist offence – under a section about possession of biological weapons. Now, according to a press release, the charges have been downgraded to ‘petty larceny’ – relating to the source of some of the harmless bacteria he was using. The value is negligible, leading to a sense of total farce (or perhaps it’s still tragedy).