Sunday, January 10, 2010

Artist more confused than hermaphrodite polar bear

In my internet ramblings I somehow found the Cape Farewell mob, who appear to sell carbon credits to suckers and then use the proceeds (and donations, of course) to take artists and "scientists" on "expeditions" to such ecologically perishable places as the arctic and the Andes. Presumably for purposes of inspiration. They looked kind of familiar, then I worked out they are the people who took intrepid freeloader Alex Hartley to the arctic, where he immediately "discovered" a lump of rock, christened it "Nowhere Island" and then promptly stole it.

From their trips to the arctic they produced a travelling expedition called "The art and climate change exhibition", which has the rather odd inclusion of a painting called "Hermaphrodite Polar Bear":



A few things immediately leap to mind, one of which is exactly how he managed to gain that unique perspective of a polar bears nether regions, and the other is how pseudohermaphroditism in polar bears has a relation to climate change? Last time I checked we were all getting freaked out by endocrine disruptors condensing over the poles then concentrating up the food chain. We can't decide on exactly which endocrine disrupting chemical pollutant is the big nasty (it depends on whats trendy in the research community at a given time)and don't exactly have comparative data going back very far, but no matter! Either way I'm pretty sure that only the truly die-hard hysterics have somehow tried to pin this on climate change.

See what happens when you invite artists to comment on science? Give me Damien Hirst, any day. If you could just ignore the ginormously obscene pricetags for a second, you could at least be impressed by the fact he managed to get a whole tiger shark into a perspex tank.

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