Literal Piece of Shit on Exhibit at Beirut Art Center

Head down to the Beirut Art Center’s current exhibit by artist Jean-Luc Moulène and you may be surprised to find this: a photograph of a piece of shit, wound in cassette tape, hanging on the wall.

The entire exhibit is missing identification cards (you know, those labels posted on the wall near works of art which usually include information like the artist’s name, the medium the work was created with, the date it was created and the name of the collection), so Beirut.com asked Mira Minkara, BAC’s communication manager, for the story behind the photograph.

“[Moulene believes] art is facing deterioration, and he had this thought in his mind before he went out and found this illustration of it; and it fits.”

“The artist’s idea is there but the interpretation is left for the audience,” says Minkara, adding, “and this is another reason why no descriptive texts were added to any of the french artist’s works.”

The artwork is titled, Digest Sound.

Art history students may remember Pierro Manzoni’s 1961 Merda D’artista in which the artist displayed cans filled with his own feces in an effort to explore the relationship between art production and human production. Back then, it was considered both shocking and an act of genius. Plus, Manzoni was the first artist to do this kind of thing.

Fast-forward to 2013 at the BAC, and Moulene’s artwork seems completely baseless and devoid of any real creativity. Indeed, art can be pretty shitty, but you shouldn’t need to take a literal picture of it to get your point across, and then go so far as to pass it off as genuine art.