I’ve always thought that the best thing in the world would be getting paid to just eat and sleep. Well, Miru Kim, a Korean-American performance artist found a way to do just that. Except, she calls it a form of art. Influenced by Buddhist teachings that all livings beings are connected in a circular manner through life force, Kim wanted to mingle with animals and feel her existence more than ever.

She therefore decided to eat and sleep with pigs, naked, for four straight days. Starting last Friday, she ended up spending 104 consecutive hours in a makeshift pen right in front of her gallery, in the company of pigs. Her project “I Like Pigs and Pigs and Pigs Like Me,” for Art Basel in Miami, is in fact a small scale version of what she had done earlier, when she curled up naked next to pigs in hog farms.

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The famous Communist leader Vladimir Ilic Lenin is still praised by some, but his doctrine is hated by most. That didn’t stop a Romanian artist from making a sweet replica of him and placing it on a pedestal.

Artist Ioana Ciocan hoped her countrymen would be able to get past their prejudices and horrible memories and accept Communism as part of Romanian history. On January 26, the birthday of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, she mounted a 3-meter-tall statue of Lenin on a pedestal, in the Free Press Square, a place closely linked to the Romanian anti-communist revolution.

The giant replica was made of chocolate, rice and candy, and was on display for a single day. Unfortunately, her artistic effort was considered an insult to the martyrs of the Romanian revolution of 1989.

As a Romanian, I can’t say I’m that insulted by Ioana Ciocan’s gesture, but then again, I was only 5 years old when people fought and died for freedom. I am however insulted by the ugliness of the sweet statue.

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What looks like the world’s biggest videotape collection, is actually an artistic display presented at this year’s Venice Biennale of Contemporary Art.

Entitled Life Span and displayed in a small church on Garibaldi Street, this giant block full of VHS videotapes is the work of Australian artists Claire Healey and Sean Cordeiro. In numbers 195,774 tapes and features a total recording time of 66 years.

Life Span is a physical representation of what a human being can see from its birth, to the day it dies.

via Drugoi