Video and Intermedia: Is it art?

As Erik recognizes in his own response, Foster underlines the natural connection between intermedia and video performance art by virtue of the innate criticism they bring to society as well as their political nature and “spontaneousness.” Of the two examples mentioned by Erik, Stille Nacht is by far the most shocking one as for the images it offers of naked bodies smeared with blood and organs from a slaughtered pig to the peaceful tune of “Silent Night.” This video does bring to mind one of the episodes of the British satire television series “Black Mirror:” “The National Anthem,” and which I highly recommend. On this episode (spoilers ahead) a member of the royal family is kidnapped. The criminal’s request (uploaded to YouTube for everyone to see): a live broadcast of the Prime Minister having sexual intercourse with a pig under specific technical arrangements. My video is a clip from this episode when the bizarre request is done:

The request is indeed executed; the PM does have sex with a pig on national television while at the end it is uncovered that the criminal was in fact a sort of performance artist who actually kills himself during the broadcast. An art critique is quoted in the episode by the news as calling the PM’s "performance" as “the first true work of art of the 21^st century.”

With both “Stille Nacht” and the satirical episode in mind, I was forced to raise the question, just like Foster does at the end of his piece, “is it art?” Not only this, but “what limits, if any, are allowed on this kind of experimentation in the name of art?” These questions go far beyond most people’s repulse to hard blood scenes and “gross” sex scenes. Indeed, it is a matter of freedom encased in morality and vice-versa. Performance art will always challenge conventional structures and ideas. But in the not so unreal event that such a request like the one done in Black Mirror is done in the real world, who, how and why, will draw the line between criminal offense (many performance artists are well acquainted with jail) and art? To me, the prospective for intermedia and performance video are both exciting as well as frightful given the trend started by Duchamp, intentionally or not, and the empowerment of video with YouTube and similar internet technologies. Moreover, the ever increasing abstraction of art from craft to concept to merely object releases all kinds of both thoughtful, as well as distorted expressions of “art.”