ABOVE: Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi drank a lot of beer and tried to walk a balance beam last week in a performance in Cardiff. Naturally, people are pissed—pun intended.

Are stupid people stupid because they misinterpret things all the time, or are they always misinterpreting things because they’re stupid? It’s one of those cause/effect things, difficult to tell in the end. Who cares? People keep on being stupid. Last week Japanese artist Tomoko Takahashi presented a performance piece at the Chapter arts centre in Cardiff, Wales. Allurements of Mass Media was a three-hour performance in which Takahashi, who also goes by the handle “Anti-Cool,” proceeded to drink bottles of beer and attempt to walk across a balance beam. Wearing high-heeled shoes and perching several feet above the ground, Takahashi got steadily more drunk as the evening wore on, and her audience became steadily more engaged as she struggled to remain upright. Although Allurements was intended to be a commentary on individual confusion in the face of mass media, we have no idea if that idea got through. But it actually sounds kind of riveting.

Naturally, one of those helpful samaritans on city council was there, outrage prepared and misinterpretations at the ready: “[It] sends out the message that binge drinking is OK,” councillor Ramesh Patel said, completely inverting the point of the performance, and adding that the piece was “trash” and a waste of taxpayers’ money. “If anyone is daft enough to want to see a young woman getting plastered and tottering around in high heels, they can do it in just about every city centre most nights of the week,”said David Davies, a Tory member of the Welsh Assembly. Well, if binge drinking is such a huge freaking problem in Britain (it is), then it seems valid for an internationally acclaimed artist to comment on it, and it also seems valid for a large art institution in the Welsh capitol to pay her the going rate. What kind of po-dunk town do these politicians think they live in?

LINK: The Telegraph > Outcry over artist ‘binge drinking’ on a grant