Artist Steve Powers has opened the new “Waterboard Thrill Ride” at Coney Island in New York. “It looks at first like any other shuttered storefront near the boardwalk: some garish lettering and a cartoonish invitation to a delight or a scam — in this case there’s SpongeBob SquarePants saying, ‘It don’t Gitmo better!’” The New York Times describes the experience:
Powers’s “initial idea was for real people to undergo real waterboarding, right there in real time” but “his wife was among the first to point out that that might be a tad over the line.” However, he claims “the purpose of his art isn’t to tell people what to think, just to get them thinking in the first place.” (HT: FP Passport)
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