A pair of artists were booted from a show over a live breast milking performance at the Art Basel art show in Miami.
As reported by TMZ, artists OONA and Lori Baldwin popped up at the Satellite Art Show this past weekend to perform "MILKING THE ARTIST," which involved OONA pumping out breast milk in front of a large crowd of potential buyers, all before putting glasses of milk up for auction.
Though the two protestors claimed the breasts were "as real as you want them to be," they seemed to be prosthetic, TMZ reported. The artists not only did the live breast milking but also tried to sell it to the spectators present at the show.
According to a press release, the first glass of milk was purchased for $64,000 (50 ETH), though the highest bid came in the second day at a whopping $200,000 (158 ETH). However, they were then forced to end the show since they were thrown out of the premises by the security.
A video of the incident has been shared by TMZ, showing OONA, wearing black outfit, and addressing the people. She reportedly asked them, "Do I need to be dead for this art to be valuable? Is this not art? Why does this make you so uncomfortable? Do I have to be naked? Is this not art? Does a breast need to be in a painting or a sculpture to be valuable?"
The two artists have also posted about their performance on their respective Instagram pages and shared their thoughts on their joint website. "At most art fairs, bare boobs only exist in paintings - framed like dead objects. Here the breasts are audacious because they are attached to a living consenting body," OONA wrote.
She continued, "Nudity is the gateway drug to the deeper layers of this piece. Sure, the performance panders to the general obsession with objectifying women, but it only stops there if you want it to,"
"The Art world's insidious underbelly determines which artists to milk and what their milk is worth. In "Milking the artist" we play with context and its relationship to value. We are raising the floor price of feminist performance art," Baldwin added.
