You could speculate, automatically snapping to the least charitable assumptions, or you could actually watch it and find out.
(Everything in the apartment was purchased, and they anonymously gave money to the mall management every month by slipping an envelope of cash under the office door saying "thanks for the utilities.")
No. That's apples and oranges, especially when you're talking about feelings. "Your crawl space" is part of a very intimate and personal space: your home. This space (a void of the type where construction workers don't clean up their trash) was part of a impersonal and pseudo-public space: a shopping mall. Your analogy doesn't hold up.
It's a very interesting piece. Here we are talking about it, it's kind of interesting to figure out, what does "palmotea" define as "pseudo-public space"?. In my experience in art practice, it is hard to participate in a conversation with people who define things by what they are NOT.
That said, to me, a great strength of a lot of performance art is its ability to attract high drama personalities. But it is tautological to say that drawing the participation of high drama personalities occurs because the art trades on obnoxiousness?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space
> ...the phrase in its broadest sense can refer to places, like shopping malls and hotel lobbies, that are privately owned and open to the public, even if they are not legally required to be open to the public.
Otherwise, you're kinda going off the rails. My one and only point is there are important differences between a home's crawl space and a weird unused space in a shopping mall that make your specific appeal to "how your wife will feel" invalid.
This secret mall apartment is more akin to a homeless guy having a hidden camp in a verge near a highway than anything to do with anyone's home. If you're going to appeal to how someone would feel, you've got to get the emotion right.
Either way it doesn’t matter. Even if they did everything completely by the book within their moral framework, they are still taking something and keeping it for themselves.
Imagine if they had bought out an old strip mall, church, etc. and converted it into a makerspace, an art studio, a shelter, a daycare, etc., and ran it off donations. Think about how much more powerful of a message that would be. Yes, we can defeat capitalism, by reclaiming space and giving it back to a community which is self-supporting. Go forth and build things for others instead of yourself.
Nope, was much edger to sit around in a concrete room and play video games, though. Needed the rush of pretending to be a movie star and going where you’re not supposed to. If you want something, just take it.
If you think there is a better community to be made, make it. If yours would be the better movie, then shoot it. If your moral framework is superior, then live with it. When you bitch about the morality of something you can't control, you are contributing less to society than wastoids playing Crash Bandicoot in an abandoned Five Below.
I’m not claiming to contribute to society, or make some grand statement, or re-define anything. The artists are. They have a higher bar to clear.
It pisses me off because they’re so smug about being confidently wrong. It would be one thing if they were just scrappy thieves and lived up to it, but they are also arrogant rat bastards who feel the need to lecture others. Fuck them and all their self-absorbed, Kombucha-chugging Hollywood cronies.
I had much the same feeling reading Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book. It was not enough to say “Here’s how to steal from old people and grocery stores.” He had to say, “Here’s how to steal from old people and grocery stores, and also here’s why you are totally justified in doing so because They are evil and different from Us, The Good Guys.” It was sickening.
This art project was in response to real estate developers taking the sspaces that they already had in old warehouses and knocking them down to build this mall. If you're interested in getting more information about what they actually did and why instead of what you assume they did and why, you should watch the movie. The worst that's going to happen is it's going to confirm every superficial assumption you're making about them.