Sending art to a better place

Sending art to a better place

Via the Art Newspaper, "One of the central works in the exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (until 12 May), Victimless Leather, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died. The artists, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, say the work which was fed nutrients by tube, expanded too quickly and clogged its own incubation system just five weeks after the show opened."

Catts and Zurr, based at an Arts and Science collaborative lab in Western Australia, designed the work as a prototype mixing living and manufactured elements, intending to provoke "a more responsible attitude towards our environment". It succeeded in doing just that, forcing curator Paola Antonelli to euthanise the jacket, halting growth permanently.

For more information, see the Victimless Leather entry at the Design and the Elastic Mind site.