Zoinks. Gregor Schneider made one of the greatest installations I have ever seen. He’s an essential artist. (Image above: a recent installation of cages on Bondi Beach.) Now, on the heels of that asshole who’s starving the dog and that abortion chick at Yale, he wants to display a dying person in a gallery. Is this different from those other pieces of shock art? They’re not even close. First, the story:

“I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died,” he told The Art Newspaper. “My aim is to show the beauty of death.”

The artist says that Dr Roswitha Franziska Vandieken, who runs her own private clinic in Düsseldorf, has agreed to help find volunteers who are willing to die in public in the name of art. Dr Vandieken was unavailable for comment. “I am confident that we’ll find people to take part,” says Schneider.

So how’s this different from dog guy and abortion girl? Choice matters a whole lot, and so does the act of engaging with another person—the dying volunteer. The dog guy forces the dog into the piece, and displays nothing so much as his cruelty. Meanwhile, the abortion girl’s piece—which seems to be a hoax—wasn’t necessarily meant to be experienced. By her lights, the art, if it exists at all, lies in the rage of conversation, among people who have heard about it.

Contrast that with Schneider, and what the gallery experience would be like. There, you’d have to reckon with another human being, they’re suffering and their illness. That is, it’s exactly opposite of the solipsism of abortion girl. And it’s also politically “neutral”—though you have to have a liberal mindset to be receptive to the art, it doesn’t necessarily moor itself to our current political battles. In that way, it’s universal.

Wonder if this will get crazy today. Via Design Boom.