At first, my reaction was, "Ewww, what a disgusting story!" But there is certainly more to it. I used to consider adoption a noble, selfless action and I still do mostly. But I've always been a bit wary towards international, cross-racial/cultural adoption. Not necessarily more child abuse incidents, but definitely more confusion. And it is not close-minded to scrutinize the motive for international adoption. At least one wonderful American adoptive parent confessed to me that it is "simpler and easier" to adopt "healthier" children from China (than in the US).

Vanessa Beecroft, in the controversial photo "Black Madonna With Twins" showing her breast-feeding the Sudanese twins. (By Matthu Placek)

What irritates me more is, other than healthier babies, feeling good and celebrity PR effect, now someone attempts to twists and binds it into "art." Although this woman artist has the track of making "bad taste" art, it is rather unforgivable to exploit an already "objectivized" and "accessorized" human group. As Karey commented, "gees, it's like she's collecting African masks to put on her wall except they are people."

But in market economy, where there is demand, there is supply. At the end, my anger is, "if you want to do it to get fame or entertain yourself, fine. Don't call it f***ing art!" But what does my anger matter? After all, they generated more GDP for the world... Sigh.

[Original Story]

From Sudan to Sundance, 'Art Star' Questions Celebrity

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 24, 2008; C01

PARK CITY, Utah -- The international art star Vanessa Beecroft knows her story of vanity and obsession is controversial, because controversy is the point. She understands you might dislike her. "I totally agree," she says. "I don't like myself either."

A global art phenomenon, Beecroft is best known as the bard of bulimia (she has serious food issues) and for her infamous performance pieces in which she assembles dozens of naked women, accessorized in wigs or chains or Gucci, and displays them before an audience of elites, who sip champagne and stare.

Beecroft went to Sudan two years ago with a camera crew and photographer because, she says, she was interested in the plight of Darfur, though she concedes that she didn't know exactly where Darfur was, and never did get there.

Instead, she found herself in southern Sudan, where she visited an orphanage, found a pair of malnourished twins and offered each a breast, swollen with milk because she had left her own young child back in New York. Beecroft says she "fell in love" with the twins, that she wanted to "save" them, and began a quixotic quest to adopt the two infant boys.

Beecroft also photographed herself with the twins suckling her breasts. In an interview, she calls the work "a souvenir." The iconographic portrait, of a white-robed Madonna and two black babies, is arresting and disturbing, raising questions about celebrity, race, colonialism, international adoption. Exploitation or liberation? "There's never been anything like the double breast-feeding photo," says Jeffrey Deitch, her former dealer in New York. The photographs are for sale through her gallery in Milan. Beecroft says they sell for $50,000 each. Most of the collectors have been Americans.

This is the story told by New Zealand filmmaker Pietra Brettkelly in the world premiere of her documentary "The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins" at the Sundance Film Festival. The movie follows Beecroft from the orphanage and Dinka cattle camps in Sudan to her home on Long Island to art exhibits in Milan and Venice. At times Beecroft's behavior is appalling, her motives and methods highly questionable, but it is difficult to turn away, and the more you watch, the more you wonder: What is best for these African children -- to be adopted by a wealthy vain celebrity, an Angelina, a Madonna, a Vanessa (who admits she is a little crazy), or for the babies to live with their relatives in a hut, and take their chances with poverty and disease?

More...