Two performanceists were forcibly evicted from the Art Basel art fair in Miami, who staged a performance with pumping women's milk, followed by an auction to sell it, TMZ reports. The organizers found the action called "Milking the Artist" too controversial.
In the video, you can see how two artists - Una and Laurie Baldwin - in front of a crowd of 300 people begin their performance. Wrapped in black, Una is pumping milk from her breast (presumably a prosthesis), shouting: “Do I really have to be dead for my art to be valuable? Isn't this art? Why are you not comfortable with this? Do I have to be naked? Isn't this art? Does a breast need to be in a painting or sculpture to be valuable?
At this time, Laurie Baldwin, dressed in white, begins bidding, naming a starting bid of $10,000. The artists ended up selling one glass of milk for 50 Ethereum ($64,000) and another for 158 Ethereum ($200,000) before they were escorted out of the room. In their social networks, the artists explained their performance as a protest against the policy of Art Basel, the organizers of which “fetishize” the female breast. “At most art fairs, naked boobs exist only in paintings, framed, like dead objects. Our breasts are bold, because they are attached to a living, consonant body, ”wrote Una.
In turn, Baldwin said that their performance is designed to “raise the floor price of feminist performance”: “The insidious underbelly of the art world determines which artists to milk and what their milk costs. In The Artist's Milking, we play with context and its relation to value".