Whack-a-Warhol at the Brooklyn Museum, “Long Live the Art-ocrats!”

If the image of the Warhol piñata at the Brooklyn Museum didn’t freak you out enough, the videos of everyone from Jennifer Rubell standing by her creation to Jerry Saltz taking a whack at the thing (and right in the mouth no less) will surely disturb you to no end. If the art world ever needed a good therapist then now is the time, I mean even if it’s just to deal with the whole art-ocracy “bashing a gay guy in the mouth” thing as a form of dessert!

Watch all the videos on YouTube: Part 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The art twitterverse was quick to give their assessment, and of course, artist William Powhida’s (@powhida) quip hit the nail in the mouth, as it were: … Regis Philbin and Jennifer Rubell…this is a really bad day for art. #

I’m sad all those pigs had to die for the party but I admit that I love the sight of people in cocktail attire washing their own carrots.

Now the buzz, according to Bloomberg, is:

This little piggy had to die for Jennifer Rubell’s “art” (via @brooklynmuseum)

Rubell, the daughter of Miami collectors Mera and Don Rubell, is becoming the art world’s favorite conceptual food wizard. Last fall, she brought apple trees into the former Dia center in Manhattan’s Chelsea district for Performa festival’s opening night. People jumped into peanuts piled on the floor and smashed chocolate replicas of Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel rabbit with hammers.

In June, she will create a wedding feast for Simon de Pury, chairman of Phillips de Pury auction house, at the Saatchi Gallery in London …

Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, decided to hire Rubell after smashing a bunny or two at the Performa benefit.

“I hit one of the ears with the hammer and there was my dessert,” Lehman said in a telephone interview. “I saw people picking the apples off the trees. It was lots and lots and lots of fun.”

So, Jennifer Rubell is an “artist” and her canvas was the Brooklyn Museum, <sarcasm>how sublime</sarcasm>. As she told Bloomberg:

It’s going to be intense … People will be forced into interactivity. It’s the exact opposite way to how we are raised to interact with art. It eliminates the possibility of being passive.

You mean, by going to the rustic-looking buffet and eating they are challenging some kind of hegemony? LOL … I hope she gets a MoMA retrospective, honestly, I do. I mean, I’m hungry.

The Brooklyn Museum, always the most virtually connected museum of them all, has good photos of the Rubell “performance” and art-inspired menu from the big night, and the live tweets from the event are pretty funny … though I’d like to suggest that any fete organized by Rubell be unofficially known as “Long Live the Art-ocrats.”