Art Or Cruel Exploitation?

Santiago Sierra creates “art” that uses people – exploits them, actually. They make powerful messages, but are they really art? He has “created pieces that involved workers from the local underclass being paid to do meaningless tasks: support a piece of Sheetrock at a 65-degree angle for an entire day; sit inside a cardboard box; or push around two-ton blocks of concrete. By designing such deliberately pointless ‘jobs,’ he highlighted the disjunction between such workers and their work, showing labor as an imposed condition rather than a choice one makes. ‘The remunerated worker doesn?t care if you tell him to clean the room or make it dirtier. As long as you pay him, it?s exactly the same. The relationship to work is based only upon money’.”