'Assassination' Artwork in NYC Draws Police Critics
A young artist hadn’t even finished setting up his latest exhibit in a makeshift New York City gallery yesterday before the first critics arrived.
City police and federal secret service agents rushed to the Manhattan site after Yazmany Arboleda, 27, hung two red- and black-lettered signs in a window giving the title of the mixed-media installation: The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama, reports the Miami Herald.
When he returned after about two hours of questioning, uncharged, a media crowd awaited. But his work is about character assassination, not violence, Arboleda tells the newspaper. “It’s about how the media has destroyed who these two people really are. There are no weapons, no blood. Nothing about the work is threatening.”
Even after the incident, he still hoped to have the installation complete and ready for public viewing this week, as planned.
Authorities say they don’t plan to ask him to take it down or alter it, according to the Herald.
But the New York Times reports that Arboleda has been asked to remove the title of the piece from the window, to which he objects.
“I’m renting that space; the space was allocated for an exhibition, and it’s my right to put those words up,” he tells the Times. “They said it could incite someone to do something crazy, like break the window. It’s terrible, because they’re violating my rights. If someone breaks a window, they’re committing a crime.”
However, a post in the Times’ City Room blog shows a photo of the gallery window indicating that he did take out the offending A-word.
It also indicates that Arboleda apparently confused some readers, including reporters, with false website claims of prior censorship of the artwork. (Their satirical nature reportedly is signaled with references to well-known individuals who are unlikely to have been affiliated with art galleries, but the references apparently were missed by a number of readers.)
The police presence at Arboleda’s partially complete installation yesterday, however, was the real thing, the City Room says, and apparently was an unanticipated performance-art aspect of his piece. “Sometimes fact can follow fiction,” the blog notes.
