Harvard Artist Shocks Campus

A Harvard art student today shocked the campus with her revelation that she had killed herself, had her body cremated, mixed the ashes with rhinoceros feces, sculpted them into pacifiers, and then sold them as teeth protectors at a local rave. She did it, she said, as a form of performance art to “highlight the mounting disparity between rich and poor in the Asian subcontinent” and to protest the ongoing war in Iraq.

The artist, who goes by the name Koko Yono but whose real name is Sally Benchman, told the Harvard Crimson that “I just wanted people to realize that there’s this giant subclass of poor Asians forced to subsist on rhinoceros dung, while we’re so rich that we waste our money baby pacifiers that don’t really protect you from damage when you collapse after a night of clubbing. Plus, George Bush is a war criminal and should be persecuted for his crimes against humanity in Darfur, in Iraq, and in the Sudan, which is why I had myself cremated, just like millions of innocents who have died by his atom bombs.”

Harvard said that the artist had assured them that the whole thing was a hoax. “When she filed for this piece she assured us that she would not really cremate herself, and we are fairly certain that she hasn’t. It’s a piece of performance art meant to provoke debate and to raise people’s consciousness. We only gave her a $40,000 grant, which is pretty much ass-wipe money for us since we’ve been screwing undergraduates for decades now.”

Yono insisted that the piece was real. “I really did cremate myself and I really did hand out rhino-dung pacifiers at rave parties here on campus. The university knows it, too, but with the negative publicity they’re too afraid to admit it.”
While campus officials did acknowledge a rise in E. Coli infections over the past few weeks, they insisted it was because of improperly stored hot dogs and not because of rhino-feces pacifiers.