Living Leather?

A curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art had to make a decision he probably never dreamed of making when he took the job as curator.

He had to euthanize a "living leather" jacket made out of mouse stem cells. The curator said that the art was growing too quickly and was about to overflow it's containment unit. The piece called "Victimless Leather" was a small jacket made out of embryonic stem cells.

The question that always comes up in these situations is "Is this art?" To me this seems to be more of a science experiment than art, but I do see the artistic value in it as well.

Another recent art story in the news was an installation by Guillermo Vargas, a Costa Rican artist. He found a stray dog on the streets of Nicaragua and tied the dog in a corner of an art gallery. He instructed the attendees not to feed the dog. Some have said the dog died, while the gallery owner, said the dog was only tied up for 3 hours at a time while the gallery was open and was otherwise treated well. Vargas himself refuses to say whether or not the dog survived, but there are some pretty awful photos of the dog online.

I'm not sure exactly what to think of this, but I believe the point of the piece is that nobody fed the starving dog, simply because they were told not to and because they were told it is art.

It was clearly a terrible thing to do to an animal, but I think it says a lot more about the art viewers, then the artists themselves.

Do you feel that these are examples of art? What do you consider art?