I saw this post pop up on my Instagram page and…I have no words…
According to news reports I have read, the exhibit involved starving three piglets on display to protest agricultural pig farming. The artist, Marco Evaristti, created the exhibit “And Now You Care” was designed to highlight the 28,000 piglets that die daily due to poor breeding conditions in Danish pig farming. As part of the exhibit, the piglets were to be confined in a cage made from shopping carts and were not to be provided with food or water. Visitors of the exhibit were given the option to use a captive bolt gun to end the piglets’ suffering, and Evaristti had also pledged to feed them only if an associated Instagram group manage to reach 22,000 members who were pledging to boycott conventionally farmed pork. Evaristti had stated on his Instagram page that the exhibition “is a confrontation with Denmark’s bloody reality” in slaughterhouses, and that he was urging people to reduce their meat consumption and support agriculture that improves animal welfare.
On the one hand, I can see what the purpose of this was: pig farming techniques across the world are under great scrutiny and yet, as with all agricultural practices really, they are not being investigated as much as they should be. In a very twisted way, this art exhibit has helped push the conversation into mainstream media, and I can see the irony of the exhibit name: starve 3 piglets as part of an art exhibit and there is world wide outcry, but starve 28,000 piglets as part of the agricultural industry and no one says anything.
However, the approach to this seems so counterintuitive. It is like trying to protest child abuse, by putting on an interactive display where visitors can beat a real child with a variety of instruments. Whilst I can appreciate what Mr Evaristti was trying to do – and to a certain degree he has achieved – there are so many other things he could have done to highlight this problem. He could have set up video screens that show what happens inside a pig farm. He could have set up an exhibit where visitors could have experienced what a farrowing crate was like to live in – to that degree he could have done this same exhibit but used consenting adults to stage the protest, similar to how Peta hold protests. He could have even done the same exhibit and used AI generated piglets or animatronic piglets to get the point across. The use of live animals – let alone baby animals – just seems so barbaric to me it is hard to understand what the message even is. He wants to condemn an entire industry for their practices, but he is more than happy to do the exact same thing for ‘art’? Make it make sense.
I am all for artistic expression and I am not saying that this exhibit is bad as a concept – my big criticism of this is the use of the live piglets. As I say, there are so many other ways that this message could have been delivered. The exhibit itself did also contain artwork, which whilst quite brutal and graphic, it was very much able to highlight what happens in pig farms and would get the message across without the need to have three baby piglets starve to death in the middle of the room. These piglets are meant to represent the victims within the animal agricultural industry, and so the best way to show this is to…make them victims of an art exhibit?! The whole concept makes zero sense to me, and it appears to me that this was nothing more than a cheap and cruel tactic for shock value to help get the awareness out there. Which I suppose it did, but – really?! The artist could not think of any other way to portray this issue? Sounds like a very uncreative person in my opinion.
Another thing that bothers me about this, is that whilst the exhibit may raise awareness of the issue, it says nothing about what someone can actually do about. Sure, eating less meat can help lower the demand and thus lower the number of animals subject to this treatment, but there are so many other things that can be done: education, legislative change, improved welfare standards, better training for staff on the farms to improve welfare standards. Personally, I am far more ‘rights’ focused, so my solution to the issue would be to end animal agriculture entirely. But I also know that welfare steps need to happen first as that is how our views of animals change – but what does Mr Evaristti actually think? What did he actually want to achieve out of this? From what I can tell, it seems he just wants to make a name for himself as a ‘shocking artist’ rather than actually providing solutions for the issues his work addresses. Which just makes it all feel very hollow in my opinion.
During my research into this situation, it would appear that Mr Evaristti is infamous for his problematic work. One in particular involved putting live goldfish into blenders, supposedly to highlight whether a person was a sadist or not (if they were, they would press the button to turn on the blender). Again, the message was an interesting concept, with the whole exhibit being used to highlight the different facets of the human psyche, but as with the piglets, the use of live animals – and somewhat encouraging visitors of the exhibit to cause intense suffering to these animals – overshadowed the entire concept of the exhibit itself. It seems that this is an artist that is more concerned with getting his name out there than he is actually getting his message across.
Thankfully, the piglets have since been collected by the Danish animal rights group, De Glemte Danske, and the exhibition has been closed since 4 March 2025. As I mention earlier, there were other pieces of art included within this exhibit, so there is no reason why the exhibit had to close once the piglets were removed. It seems to me that without the shock factor, Mr Evaristti has very little conviction for the matters his art is supposedly meant to address – he is all for raising awareness about animal suffering, so long as he can also cause animal suffering in the process. Which to me just seems lazy, cruel, and a sad cry for attention. I hope that any new exhibit Mr Evaristti wishes to create actual has some true creative thought behind it, and he stops relying on horrific shock tactics to get his message across.
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