Thanks, Lox.

Guys, performance/installation art isn't for everybody. There's lots of it I don't much like, same as there's lots of paintings I don't much like. A good deal of this kind of art depends on obscuration, misdirection and ambivalence to suggest or illustrate a message. This piece is a perfect example of that, and in that context, it has certainly been successful. I can't prove it, but I seriously doubt that a dog was starved to death during a three hour presentation in a gallery.

Bonnie mentioned the "fort like nature of museums". In fact, most small to medium sized galleries and museums are not very secure at all - there isn't enough profit to be made to spend money on huge amounts of security if you aren't holding a collection of Rembrandts or Jasper Johns or some other big names. Most of the small galleries around here are hardly more secure than my house - less so, as people wander in and out at will, the room might be empty while the single attendant is in the bathroom or a back office, there's nobody there after hours, etc.

By the way, your nice Pre-Raphaelite may have depended on the services of an abused model-prostitute. Throughout the history of painting, most artists employed street prostitutes as models. Gaugin's beautiful paintings of young Tahitian girls illustrate the fact that he was essentially a pedophile who regularly lived with twelve year old girls. Art and artists can be exploitive, and the age/beauty of the work is not an indicator of the moral atmosphere in which it was created, nor of the good conduct of the artist.