Berlin has really pushed to market itself as a liberal and tolerant city (having been marred as a whole during WWII they are now trying to completely over ride the former image of Germany...at any cost). Prostitution is 100% legal--they have a union and pay taxes. The main strip for the Johns to pick up prostitutes was recently under construction to repair the cable car track. This closed the street for an entire month (apparently the Dept of Transportation in Germany is just as fast as the ones in the US). The prostitute union banned together and sued the state of Germany for lost wages...and WON! The sum was worth a couple of thousand for each worker (the shops and bakery on the same street got nothing for the month).
On our tour we saw where an exhibit from Chilean artist Evaristti was being prepared for his next controversial piece. His last exhibit (which was shut down by PETA) was a table with 10 blenders, plugged in and fully functioning, with live goldfish swimming around inside awaiting the public to decide their fates (coincidentally after many hours only 3 of the blenders had the button pushed). His next piece promises to leave the public with an even deeper moral dilemma. He has befriended a death row inmate in Texas who has agreed to donate his body for the artist's use. He plans to freeze dry it into pellets for fish food and leave the pellets out for the audience to feed the tank of goldfish. Now if people do not use the pellets to feed the fish the fish will die (they will have no other food source)...so to save the fish (which was the cry of PETA at his last exhibit) the audience has to use the inmates remains.
What would you do if you were in the audience?
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