Mrs. Weer’d found this strange story for me.
There was a bit of a stench coming off it, though. Ms. Ginn’s gown was made of rat pelts, 300 of them, that she had tanned and sewn together. Their tails encircled her abdomen; two rat faces met on her right shoulder. “I thought that was cute,” she said, and laughed. “They’re kind of kissing. I do anthropomorphize them sometimes.” …Twenty people, mostly friends of Ms. Ginn or the gallery owner, Ms. LaViola, nibbled on goat cheese bruschetta topped with rat leg tenderloin, and rat-pork terrine encircled with beef fat, prepared by a chef after much trial and error with his proteins. The rats were shipped from a United States Department of Agriculture-approved West Coast processor that supplies pet owners with humanely killed, individually flash-frozen rodents, in classifications ranging from “jumbo” to “fuzzy.” Seventy five rats were skinned and cooked — and broiled and smoked and grilled — for the dinner, and most guests paid $100 each to attend, signing a liability waiver, some not entirely willingly…. Contemplating urban wildlife in New York naturally led her to rats. “I could’ve gone pigeon,” she allowed. But, she added, “I think people are a little more comfortable with pigeon, and I wanted to put people outside of their comfort zone.”
It was her challenge too: Ms. Ginn was a vegetarian until she decided to do this project last year; her first meat in 16 years was fried rat. “We had it with kind of a spicy dipping sauce,” she said. How’d it taste? “Strange. I didn’t have a good frame of reference.” (Her appetite for irony is robust, though: While she was skinning animals at home, she worked as a pet-sitter.)
A little out there, she is. Still I can’t imagine rat meat is all that bad…tho maybe a bit of work for what you get, but most rats aren’t too far off in anatomy or size of a squirrel, and people eat those. The pelts are quite pretty…but small, so that’s also a lot of work for what you get.
Amusing, still as “art”, I dunno.
The dinner rather reminds me of this:
