"[T]hree large blank sheets of paper had been affixed to a wall. On the floor was a basin filled with a viscous liquid, tempera paint mixed with animal blood...."

"Then Mendieta—an energetic and diminutive woman, just five feet tall, if that—walked in, to the accompaniment of a drumbeat, dressed in a baggy white ensemble. She drenched her hands and arms in the mixture, reached to the top of one piece of paper, then forcefully smeared her limbs down the surface to make two bloody tracks, ending up on her knees on the floor. Mendieta performed this action twice more before absenting herself, leaving the audience to contemplate the visceral imprints she left behind.... It’s impossible to view Mendieta’s output and not think about the physical stamina and cultural daring that she must have had—not only to make art from her exposed body but also to hide herself away and make work that might only ever please or satisfy herself...."

From "Ana Mendieta, the Body Artist/Decades after her death, her bold innovations are finally coming into focus" (The New Yorker).

"What distinguished Ms. Export’s work, beyond its aggression and sheer volume, was its lucidity."

I'm reading "Valie Export, Who Made Art With Her Naked Body, Dies at 85" (NYT).

Ms. Export was best known for two pieces she staged in the late 1960s and early ’70s. In the first, “Action Pants: Genital Panic,” she walked into a movie theater in Munich in 1968, wearing crotchless pants that put her exposed genitals directly in the sightline of seated theatergoers....

"On a recent afternoon at the Venice Biennale, I walked into a bright blue portable john and peed for art."

"Just outside the booth, a naked woman was submerged in a huge water tank, breathing through a scuba mouthpiece. My urine was about to pass along a tube from the toilet through several filtration systems, before topping up her glass chamber’s water level. The performer, who would stay in the tank for at least four hours, was essentially living in other people’s waste. And she had plenty of donors. The toilet is part of a presentation called 'Seaworld Venice' by the choreographer and theater-maker Florentina Holzinger that is undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year’s Biennale, which opens to the public on Saturday and runs through Nov. 22."

From "These Toilets in Venice Have the Art World Aflush/Undoubtedly the biggest talker at this year’s Venice Biennale is the Austrian pavilion, where visitors can make their own contributions to the work on show" (NYT).

I clicked on that link for "Seaworld Venice" and was confronted with big red letters saying "I live in your piss."

This is the kind of degradation of women that feminists used to rail against, but, here, the artist is female, so I guess we're not supposed to notice. The message is purportedly environmentalism. Also the artist puts herself out there: "Part of the performance at the pavilion involved Holzinger swinging her body from side to side inside a metal bell attached to a crane to make it ring out." Video at the link. Holzinger is naked. A commenter over there notes that she risks deafness, performing as a bell clapper.

ADDED: I don't remember ever seeing "talker" used to mean the thing being talked about: the show is "undoubtedly the biggest talker of this year's Biennale." I understand "talker" meaning a person doing that talking, but not This show is a big talker, meaning it's what everyone's talking about. I guess it's like the use of "-er" in "looker" used to refer to someone people look at and not the one doing the looking.

The OED defines "talker" only as the one doing the talking. An example from Jane Austen (from "Emma"): "I am rather a talker; and now and then I have let a thing escape me which I should not." 

And then there's that Shakespeare adage, from "Richard III": "Talkers are no good doers." I think we don't use that one too much. We're more likely to go with: "All talk and no action," "Actions speak louder than words," "Talk is cheap," and "Walk the walk, don't just talk the talk." 

"People like Trump and Putin are not politicians; they are artists who create alternate realities."

"They tell stories, invent alternative facts, enact daily dramas, construct show trials and reinvent religions — they build a world. In their world, the people who felt humiliated are now dominant and doing the humiliating. Russia felt humiliated by the West in the 1990s. Many working-class American voters have felt humiliated by coastal elites for decades. In this alternative world, the snobs suffer. People support an authoritarian not because they like this or that policy but because they embrace the authoritarian’s artistic vision. Performance artists like Trump and Putin can be dishonest, offensive and outrageous, but there is one rule: They must never be boring."

Writes David Brooks, in "Imagining What’s in Trump’s Brain" (NYT)(gift link).

I'm expending one of my gift links on this one because this snippet, taken out of context, gives rise to the question Are artists authoritarians?

Brooks is "imagining what's in Trump's brain" and we're stuck with the added task of imagining what's in Brooks's brain when he's imagining what's in Trump's brain. Trump is an artist because he's imagining — conjuring up an "alternative world" that is satisfying to the downtrodden. But don't all politicians depict the world in a somewhat abstract and fictional framework? They impose a narrative. They choose which facts to highlight, while their opponents select other facts from the big bag of "facts." The "coastal elites," the "snobs," have their creative narratives too... and this David Brooks column is one of them.

Quite apart from Trump and Brooks, I am fascinated by the question Are artists authoritarians? I am reminded of something I blogged 20 years ago: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

Box ticked.

I'm reading Julia Halperin's "Covering an Artist With Unconventional Materials: Strict Rules and Time/A culture reporter is always watching for art that challenges us to look at the world, and our lives, differently. An artist who lived in a cage for a year ticked that box" (NYT).

Hsieh’s retrospective brings together documentation of and objects from all of his one-year performances. In addition to “Cage Piece,” they include “One Year Performance 1980-1981 (Time Clock Piece),” for which he punched a timecard clock every hour on the hour, including at night; and “Art/Life One Year Performance 1983-1984 (Rope Piece),” for which he spent the year tied to the artist Linda Montano by an eight-foot rope. Hsieh made “One Year Performance 1985-1986 (No Art Piece),” when he refused to look at, think about, talk about or make art. That gallery is empty.... 

Why would someone do these outrageous things? Why are they considered art?... Hsieh resisted answering my questions.... “It’s not like I become Superman,” he told me.

"In 1969, at the age of 38, just as she was gaining attention for her brawny, abstract paintings, she abandoned the form and initiated her 'General Strike Piece'..."

"... which involved a gradual withdrawal over a period of several months from the art world’s openings and social events, the first step in a long process of distancing herself from her peers.... In August 1971... she undertook another, even more audacious project, 'Decide to Boycott Women,' stating her intention to stop speaking to other women. In her notes on the piece, she suggested it would be temporary.... But it ended up being a practice she continued throughout the rest of her life, mostly, though not entirely, avoiding women (even allegedly once refusing to be helped by a female clerk at a grocery store). The blunt hostility of this piece struck many of her friends and, later, art critics and historians as an act of self-destruction.... 'Lee was very moody, drinking a lot of cheap wine and smoking lots of dope. I was raising my young son and had to ask her to leave after a few days. I remember thinking that she was a kind of warning about what could happen if you mixed art and life too closely.'... A picture of her last decades emerges only in shards and anecdotes. For several years she lived with her parents, until her father filed a restraining order and she was forced to move into her own apartment in the same complex.... She’s like a character in a Kafka story, or Melville’s Bartleby, but funnier, more perverted, more playful and an invention not of another writer’s mind but of her own...."

I'm reading "She Didn’t Speak to Other Women for 28 Years. What Did It Cost Her?/ When it came to using her life in her work, the artist Lee Lozano went about as far as a person can go" (NYT).

Back in the 1970s, one would often read about things like this. I'd thought the culture had lost interest in this sort of thing. I wonder what prompted the revival of interest — wanting to forefront a woman artist? But this woman made a lifelong project out of boycotting women. Are we supposed to believe she sacrificed something she wanted to be able to do?

Here's the comment NYT readers rate highest: "Refusing to speak to other woman is sexist and borderline sociopathic. It is most definitely not art, it's merely an eccentric and fairly selfish personality trait...." That's consistent with my observation that the culture has moved away from seeing weird acting out as art. It's a mental disorder... unless it has the honor of counting as an expression of "identity."

The artist of street litter.

"This is America showing itself because it was never in you in the first place. So why am I upset that you're upending something..."

"... that was never in you in the first place? I'm not saying that we shouldn't be upset. We definitely should be upset. But why are we-- we can't be upset at people that it was never in them in the first place to even care about somebody else."

Said a black woman, heard in episode 857 of "This American Life," "Museum of Now."

She is commenting on the removal of the 2-block-long, 50-foot-tall words, "Black Lives Matter," that had been set in concrete in a street near the White House.

Prompted by the question, "Is this more honest, actually, that they actually are ripping this up?," we hear her struggling in real time to understand why the de-installation of the motto wasn't upsetting her or wasn't upsetting her that much.

One might say the original installation was propaganda and pandering. Jackhammering it out of there said something accidental and authentic.

"'Looking at a girl totally naked is not exciting,' said Éric Stefanut, the communications director for the French Naturist Federation."

"Naturists, he explained, see new people naked all the time. 'So,' he added, 'it’s boring.'... When everyone in a room is naked, no one person stands out — although there were many body types among the visitors on Friday. There were tattoos and pierced nipples, ribs and fleshy tummies, bald spots and wispy beards. Scrotums and breasts swung wide. Some had cesarean scars.... Lucca Linke, 31, said she had thought about trimming her body hair. But why bother? Her friend, Kaja Baumgart, 22, agreed. She had worried that other guests would notice her tampon string. But soon, she said, she relaxed. 'Everybody is acting like normal,' she said. 'I can also be acting like normal.'"

From "At This French Exhibition, Check Your Clothes at the Door/A museum in Marseille, France, has a show dedicated to the history of social nudity. On a few special nights, visitors strolled around naked, too" (NYT).

It's art — purportedly — to take what is very interesting and endeavor to make it boring.

People don't want to shout out their own name, but Kamala Harris seems to have thought it would be a cool way to demonstrate that "It's about all of us."

They were loudly chanting her name, and she instructed them to shout out their own name, the idea being, I think, to unleash a hilarious, heartwarming cacophony:

This might be the most awkward moment ever, the second-hand embarassment is real pic.twitter.com/ObaMKPR9c3

— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) October 29, 2024

But she got silence. She still pretended she'd received the desired response, and declared the conclusion to be derived from the demonstration that hadn't happened: "It's about all of us."

Apparently, individualism is not in vogue... or not something her people feel good about expressing loud and proud.

If I followed the method of the elite media and the Democratic Party, I would call it fascistic. The crowd showed that it only wanted to be unified behind the identity of the adored leader.

ADDED: I feel the strong need to republish a post I wrote in September 2018:

"Everybody’s constantly looking for the next job, and it’s incredibly cynical and transactional and, now, dysfunctional."

"I’ve been disappointed on the reality of that part of it. And it’s just also astonishing. I can’t understand why there’s people that are willing to spend tens of millions of their own money to try to hold that office. ’Cause then you can get there and be like, Hmm, look at the glamour: I’m sitting in a 500-square-feet apartment, and I’m on Grubhub and watching bad TV on Netflix or whatever. I like to ask all of my colleagues, Hey, is there some kind of secret society or like a social life or something glamorous? Even [Mitt] Romney, I mean, he’s incredibly wealthy, and he has a nice house, but I read that he sits on his nice chair and watches Netflix and eats salmon from his friend, and actually puts ketchup on it. So I haven’t met that one person that’s having that quintessential glamorous life. It’s been elusive for me, but it’s not one that would even appeal to me. I think people all think life is like 'The West Wing' or something, where it’s snappy dialogue. But a lot of it comes down to just really bad performance art."

Said John Fetterman, asked to explain why he doesn't consider himself a politician, in "The Interview/John Fetterman Fears Trump Is Stronger Than Ever" (NYT).

Here, you can watch the interview:

ADDED: The headline may make you think there's something valuable about Trump. I'll cherry-pick it for you:

Is she even asking for a box?

Trump has this at Truth Social:

No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris. We had this out previously with former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he was in a debate, and he was not allowed a “lift.” It would be a form of cheating, and the Democrats cheat enough. “You are who you are,” it was determined!

Easy for him, the taller one, to say. How quickly you perceive the principle in formal equality when you are the one who comes out ahead and when you are a member of the group that, systematically, gets the real-world benefit.

But though I am ready to make arguments in favor of lining the heads up for television viewing, I'm not seeing that her people are asking for that. 

Why not try it?

Would you debate him on a box?
Would you debate with him on Fox?
Not on a box. And not on Fox.
Not in a house. Not with a mouse.
Not here or there.
Not anywhere.

And check out this art project:

"'Sculpture Tactile,' a white box, four and a half by one and a half feet, with a live model inside, and a single hole through which to reach her."

"When I visited, I reached in, past a black curtain, and was struck first by warmth, the stillness of the air suspended like an inhale. I submerged my arm past my elbow until all of a sudden I reached flesh: curves and warm skin. I felt the distinct edge of a forearm giving way to a wrist. How familiar, how sensual, how normal. After a beat I stopped trying to guess how she was sitting and gave into sensation, feeling this delicate creature I was honored to share a species with.... [Yve] Klein conceived the idea for 'Sculpture Tactile' in 1957. But the gallery’s co-owner, Dominique Lévy, who also curated the installation, said Klein feared the world was not ready for this show. He died of a heart attack at age 34.... When Lévy Gorvy Dayan refabricated the box as a complete work of art in 2014... 'You had all these very intellectual conversations about the role of performance,' Lévy said. 'Now, the reactions are much more visceral and emotional.'... Had we become more prudish? Most of the people I observed shuddered upon making contact with the model, instantly retracting their arms. Some shrieked, most winced...."

Writes Rachel Sherman, in "I Was a Nude Model for a Half Hour. Revelatory? Actually, Yes. Two shows — an art fair in Brooklyn and an Yves Klein exhibition uptown — ask if nude art can still inspire or shock. I joined in to find out" (NYT). 

ADDED: The article refers to "'Anthropometries of the Blue Epoch,' a short archival video."

"[T]he voyeuristic new 'Portal' street exhibit in the Flatiron District connecting New York City and Dublin with a 24/7 live video feed has already caused chaos..."

"... with mischief-makers on Ireland’s side flashing everything from their bare bums to swastikas and a photo of the Twin Towers in flames on 9/11.... [The] earnest utopian vision proved no match for the pub-lined Dublin thoroughfare, whose Guinness-glugging patrons were quickly drawn to the futuristic-looking exhibit like moths to a flame in videos circulating online. Within hours of the Dublin portal going live, a 'very drunk' woman in her 40s was led away by cops and arrested after 'grinding' her backside against the screen... Adam Nunan, a cruise ship audio engineer originally from Dublin and in New York while the ship is docked here, said, 'That doesn’t represent Ireland very well when you do that. That was everyone’s thoughts back home, there was a lot of people who didn’t want the portal to be built for that reason, that Americans might look at Irish people in the portal doing weird stuff....'"

From "NYC-Dublin live video art installation already bringing out the worst in people with lewd displays" (NY Post).

Earnest utopian vision? Why was this invitation to exhibitionism able to be promoted as utopian? And on what basis does the NY Post present the "utopian vision" as earnest? And why does the headline say "bringing out the worst in people" when the article is all about what's happening on the Irish end of the portal? 

"[T]he Ladies Lounge of Australia’s Museum of Old and New Art... a conceptual artwork, is decorated with Picassos and other expensive adornments..."

"... and is separated from the rest of the museum with opulent green curtains. A staff member is posted outside to prevent the entry of any visitor who does not identify as a woman, and guests can indulge in a $325 high tea service featuring fancy finger food.... The American artist behind the lounge, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to the private museum’s owner, told the tribunal that the practice of requiring women to drink in ladies lounges rather than public bars only ended in parts of Australia in 1970 and that in practice, exclusion of women in public spaces continues.... But she said she 'got a rise' out of the discrimination complaint and was 'pretty excited' when she learned it had been filed over her work. 'It carries it out of the museum and into the real world.'... Kaechele attended the tribunal Tuesday flanked by 25 female supporters dressed in pointedly court-appropriate attire — think pearls, suits and stockings...."

From "She made an artwork that excluded men. A man sued for discrimination" (WaPo).

Here's the museum's website for the artwork. Sample text: "The lounge is a tremendously lavish space in our museum in which women can indulge in decadent nibbles, fancy tipples, and other ladylike pleasures.... [Y]ou are a participant in... the art itself, part of a living installation."

I wonder if the lawsuit, too, is part of the art itself, the living installation. 

You'd think just having a $325 high tea service would be enough to keep the men out. The product itself is exclusionary — exclusionary of everyone who doesn't love stuff like that. But they had a guard to actively exclude any man, and that made a point: See how you feel when the tables are turned? But the point is only made at the men who are not stereotypical men, the men not put off by the service of $325 high tea.

"'Imponderabilia'... requires two nude performers to stand opposite each other in a slim doorway that visitors are encouraged to squeeze through to enter an adjoining gallery."

"According to his lawsuit, [the performer John] Bonafede was sexually assaulted seven times by five museum visitors.... Mr. Bonafede said in legal filings... that MoMA officials 'turned a blind eye' to the assaults and created a hostile work environment where performers were expected to submit to the actions of unruly audience members.... [T]he exhibition was grueling for many performers. Some participants reported fainting in the galleries.... Others complained that guests were inappropriately touching their bodies and making rude remarks about their appearances.... If visitors were uncomfortable passing between a naked man and woman, they were allowed to walk through another entryway to the left and skip the experience...."

From "MoMA Sued by Artist Who Performed Nude in Marina Abramovic Work/The artist, John Bonafede, says museum officials failed to prevent visitors from sexually assaulting performers in the 2010 show" (NYT).

"The appointed billboard was above a Sunglass Hut, just a few paces from an Armed Forces recruiting station. Times Square was doing its Times Square thing..."

"... total sensory overload. Capitalism on cocaine. It was 8:15 p.m. I waited. Was this actually going to happen or was it some kind of conceptual art prank? And who even is Yoko Ono?

Writes Sebastian Smee in "No matter what the haters say, Yoko Ono was always about peace. Now her message is on a Times Square billboard" (WaPo). The billboard is pink and just says "Imagine Peace."

Answering his question "who even is Yoko Ono?," Smee continues:

Ono had a gift for “event scores” that were by turns mundane, poetic and (poetically) impossible.... [for example] “Disappearing Piece,” which simply commands: “Boil water” (the piece ends when the water completely evaporates) and “Clock Piece,” which instructs: “Make all the clocks in the world fast by/ two seconds without letting anyone know/ about it.”

You can easily imagine one that says: “Sit next to John Lennon throughout the recording sessions for a Beatles album. Do nothing — except when you scream.” Or one that says, simply: “Imagine Peace.”...

Smee discusses Ono's "Cut Piece," from 1964, which I embedded on this blog 11 days ago, here. Ono sits silently and quietly while members of the audience do what she's instructed: Pick up scissors and cut pieces of her clothing away. My embedding had to do with some current fashion that looked as if someone had taken scissors to a woman's ordinary clothes and left them disturbingly lopped off. Smee connects it to her long history of peace activism:

"'The Larry Project,' neurotic and tender by turns, evolved into a much more emotional, all-encompassing undertaking — in which the absent Larry, whom Ms. Upson never met..."

"... expanded into the artist’s muse, her lover, her persecutor and, ultimately, her doppelgänger. By the end, no clean distinction was left between artist and subject; the two had become doubles. One drawing in the Hammer Museum show bore the words 'I am more he than he is.' The project ended in 2011 with a performance at a Los Angeles gallery at which she dragged a charcoal-and-wax mannequin of Larry on the walls and floor inside a plywood cube until the effigy disintegrated, symbolically turning Larry’s body into dust."

 
"Kaari Upson, California Artist of Desire and Disturbance, Dies at 51/Known for her resin sculptures and her disquieting videos, she was one of the most significant artists to emerge from the vibrant 21st-century Los Angeles art scene" (NYT). (Upson died of breast cancer.)

A contemporaneous artist obituary: "Chuck Close, Artist of Outsized Reality, Dies at 81/He found success with his large-scale Photorealist portraits, becoming one of the leading artists of his generation. Late in life he faced allegations of sexual harassment" (NYT):

In the 1970s, he began to translate his photographic sources into pixelated images, filling in the individual cells of a grid with distinct marks, colors and tones that would cohere into photographic images when viewed from a distance....  His pragmatic, problem-solving approach would serve Mr. Close well in the second half of his career. In New York, on Dec. 7, 1988, he was felled by what turned out to be a collapsed spinal artery, which initially left him paralyzed from the neck down. In the ensuing months of rehabilitation, he began to regain movement in his arms, and he was able to sit up and paint using brushes strapped to his hand. He not only returned to painting with unimpaired ambition but also began producing what many would view as the best work of his career.... Up close, the new paintings seemed to swarm with woozy, almost psychedelic energy, while from a distance the image would emerge in all its photographic exactness.

As for the allegations of sexual harassment, a doctor is quoted attributing his actions to Alzheimer's disease: "He was very disinhibited and did inappropriate things, which were part of his underlying medical condition. Frontotemporal dementia affects executive function. It’s like a patient having a lobotomy — it destroys that part of the brain that governs behavior and inhibits base instincts."

"Mr. Midgette, his hair painted and powdered silver-white and his face covered with pale makeup, passed himself off as Warhol at several colleges with Warhol’s blessing..."

"... fielding questions after showings of Warhol films.... Mr. Midgette pulled off his impersonation at a time when Warhol’s reputation had begun to spread beyond New York City but when, to most of America, he was still more of a vague concept than a recognizable personality.... 'The one thing I knew about Andy was, you could answer any question any way you liked and it would be fine,' he said... 'It might not have been the same thing he would say, but it would make as much sense... It made me realize how, in life, people just presume a lot of things.... Just because you’ve met Andy twice, does it mean you remember exactly how he looked, and how he would look under different circumstances? If you’re being told it’s Andy and everyone else is accepting it, you’ll go along with that. It shows you how people just aren’t very curious about what’s in front of them.'"

From "Allen Midgette, an Ersatz Andy Warhol, Dies at 82/In a prank, or perhaps a piece of performance art, Mr. Midgette pretended to be the famed artist on a lecture tour in 1967" (NYT).

Andy Warhol said, "He was better than I am.... He was what the people expected. They liked him better than they would have me."

When are you such a thing that a fake you would be more you than you? We have one solid answer: Andy Warhol.

"So he hauled a new generator into his S.U.V., strapped $800 worth of wood onto the vehicle’s roof and drove down into one of the city’s ravines in the middle of the night..."

"... to build... a wooden box — 7 feet 9 inches by 3 feet 9 inches — sealed with a vapor barrier and stuffed with enough insulation that, by his careful calculation, would keep it warm on nights when the thermometer dipped as low as minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. He put in one window for light, and attached smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Later, he taped a note to the side that read, 'Anyone is welcome to stay here.' Since then, Mr. Seivwright (pronounced Seeve-right), 28, has built about 100 similar shelters with a crew of 40 volunteers and more than $200,000 in donations. He has hauled them to parks across Toronto where homeless encampments have slumped into place — jarring reminders of the pandemic’s perversely uneven effects. The city’s bureaucrats called them illegal and unsafe, and stapled trespass and eviction notices to many, informing their residents that the city had rented out hotel rooms for them. They served Mr. Seivwright with an injunction, ordering him to stop putting the structures on city-owned land." 

From "The Carpenter Who Built Tiny Homes for Toronto’s Homeless/Khaleel Seivwright built himself a wooden shanty while living on a West Coast commune. Then he started building similar lodgings for homeless people in Toronto to survive the winter" (NYT).

The box is not much larger than a coffin (which tends to be 7.17 feet by 2.5 feet), but people prefer them even when they know "the city had rented out hotel rooms for them." A city can't allow a shantytown — far below its standards of habitability — to grow up its in its parks. But Seivwright is nevertheless celebrated.

I can see how building these squalid boxes and depositing them around town works as protest art, speaking loudly to the people of Toronto about the poor and desperate people who live in their midst. The city is providing hotel rooms, but if these people are in hotel rooms, the housed citizens of Toronto won't need to agonize about them.

To be in the box is to be inside but outside, seen but unseen. To be in a hotel room is to be thoroughly inside and unseen. That's what the city prefers. I don't think the article explains why it is what the homeless prefer.

(To comment, you can email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Owen writes: 

Sorry, this guy sounds whack. These boxes are not Habitats for Humans but a kind of litter. There’s a reason why cities have governments, poor and stupid and cruel as they may be; and it’s to help manage the risks to health and safety that come with our common lives. Your analysis takes some account of the “City” as if it were a bumbling bureaucracy —easy to mock, that. But what about the *citizens* of the city? The suffering nameless individuals who pay the taxes, try to mind their ways and be decent to each other, try to build lives and raise families, try to *use the (few, crowded, worn) amenities* of the city? Who now find the homeless occupying their parks, cadging and foraging and leaving a trail of trouble, encouraged now by characters like this to repurpose the precious open space into flop-houses and latrines? Do the citizens not get a voice in this little hippie happening?

I think citizens are getting fed up with this. Not just in Toronto, either.