yazmany arboleda, a 27-year-old artist from miami, was questioned by police on wednesday about the exhibit he was attempting to set up on west 22nd street. he had rented the vacant storefront to mount a show of his own work for a two-day run.
what do the police care about an art exhibit? nothing. in this case, they only cared about its name: the assassination of hillary clinton / the assassination of barack obama.
arboleda went voluntarily to the stationhouse for questioning, which he characterized as “an interrogation”, and was subsequently released without charges.
I’VE GOT NEWS FOR YOU, YAZ: when the NYPD interrogates you (and they do still interrogate people), you’re NOT walking out a free man. you will be charged with something (typically resisting arrest) and bundled off to central booking, where they take away your shoelaces and your belt and cuff your hands behind you until it’s time to see the judge.
WAS ALL THIS QUESTIONING NECESSARY? of course not. but it was an extremely predictable knee-jerk reaction by cops on the beat. “what? they’re having assassinations over there? holy shit, joey, better call for backup!” it’s common knowledge that NYPD street cops are not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer — the sharpest knives don’t take jobs that start at $35k, they go to work in westchester, or for the FBI. it’s getting harder and harder for the new york city police department to find ANYBODY willing to do the job; there hasn’t been a full class of rookies in several years now, and a cop shortage is an eventual reality here unless something changes fairly soon. but i digress.
THE ART ITSELF HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ASSASSINATION — arboleda is quite insistent about that when talking to reporters, and it’s pretty clear that he’s never talked to reporters so much in his life. it’s also pretty clear that the opportunity to talk to reporters is the only reason the show is titled this way. he explains that the work is about character assassination. i can’t quite see how a giant painting of hillary’s face sheds much light on the character assassination that she surely has, over her career, been subject to, but then i am not very knowledgeable about modern art so perhaps there is a connection. however, if that’s truly the subject, why not title the show “the character assassination of…”? because then the cops won’t come and “interrogate” you and your name won’t be in the papers two days running, that’s why.
I AM ALL ABOUT FREE SPEECH AND FREEDOM OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION, and the genuine controversy that is often sparked thereby. but this show is neither genuine NOR controversial: it is a blatant example of an artist who manipulated public fears and police ignorance in order to get himself a bully pulpit, and i have no respect at all for such capers: politicans do this kind of crap all the time, with their bullshit photo-ops; i don’t tolerate it from them and i see no reason why i should tolerate it from this young man just because he conducted his p/r campaign under the umbrella of modern art.
that’s why i say yazmany arboleda is full of shit — and not the kind that chris ofili uses, either.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You couldn’t be more right. Offensive controversial images in the name of publicity. Pretty pathetic in my opinion.
I am a First Amendment absolutist to the point of the ridiculous, and this has reached that point. The artist (who won’t get his name mentioned by me) is counting on publicity; let public opinion, and never the law, shut him down. Which is what you said. And what we should do. Form an artists’ boycott of his work. (He didn’t even have the guts to go with his premise and say his titles were an artistic statement in themselves, so he is really a loser).
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