Strange Culture

In May 2004 Steve Kurtz's life was turned upside down. Kurtz, a founding member of the award-winning collective Critical Art

Ensemble, was a tenured art professor at SUNY, Buffalo. His work and that of the collective was of a kinetic conceptual sort, much of it aimed at informing audiences about the lack of regulation and potential risks of genetically modified (GM) food. Shortly before his show was to open at MASS MoCA, a museum in North Adams, Massachusetts, Kurtz's wife of twenty years died in her sleep. When police responded to his 911 call, they saw petri dishes in his home--part of the scheduled installation--filled with bacteria cultures. They called the FBI.

At that point, the nation was still reeling from the 2001 anthrax scares. Kurtz was detained (not arrested, not charged but held beyond the range of due process, under the USA Patriot Act) on suspicion of bioterrorism. Within days, FBI tests showed that there were no harmful biological agents in his house and that his wife had died of natural causes. But the case against Kurtz has not gone away. Forced to drop charges of weapons manufacture, a federal prosecutor charged mail fraud against both Kurtz and Robert Ferrell, a professor of genetics at the University of Pittsburgh who sent Kurtz the uncontestedly harmless, legal, unregulated bacterial cultures used in his artwork. The "fraud" alleged is that they did not reveal, in a requisition form, the purpose of the mailing. Neither the University of Pittsburgh nor Buffalo has asserted fraud, and neither Ferrell nor Kurtz believed that there was anything fraudulent in their dealings. The allegation of fraud is made exclusively by the federal prosecutor--a first as far as anyone knows.

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