We talked to the guy who made a painting of Google's Eric Schmidt out of poop to find out why
The other two? Mark Zuckerberg and Katsu's pet cocker spaniel, which qualified because it always barked, he said.
"They are the titans of the cloud. They may be worse than the worst oil tycoons," Katsu said.
It was Mark Zuckerberg (not made out of feces) that drew me into this exhibit. I was walking on Mission St. in the eponymous neighborhood of San Francisco when I noticed the poster marquees in front of the Gray Area Grand Theater had Mark Zuckerberg's face surrounded by doves with a giant R.I.P. 1984-2015.
As much as the Mission neighborhood has made a stink over its new techie neighbors, portraits made of feces and Zuckerberg marquees are not its normal mode of protest.
These were not the neighborhood's usual activists, as I realized when I entered the theater to find techies and artists taking photos in front of a giant backdrop of the National Security Agency's PRISM slides.
The theater is putting on the last show of an artist collective known as Free Art and Technology Lab, or FAT Lab, which once boasted Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti as a member. The New York-based group came to San Francisco to lament how technology has changed.
"When I see cat videos, I don't see cats anymore," said Evan Roth, who co-founded the lab in 2007 just as the viral internet and sites such as KnowYourMeme.com were taking off. The open, viral culture of the internet changed, and now he views cat videos as Google tracking him with cookies and selling him to advertisers rather than the pure source of entertainment it once was.
Even Kim Kardashian is in on the act, as an art piece.
In a back room, she cried clouds and the FAT Lab logo over the audience.
Below her was a performance art piece from Katsu.
He had gone to the Tenderloin neighborhood, a low-income part of San Francisco that's now home to Twitter, and purchased $250 of crack cocaine. A 3D printer spent the night replicating his score at a much larger scale for a message about gentrification.
A Sepia-toned Eric Schmidt was flashing with neon lights nearby.
As Katsu explained the art to me, someone went to up to his other work and tried to take a hit from it.
It was a hacked Star Wars toy that measures your brain waves. He'd set it up so that it heats up a bong. And in true San Francisco fashion, people were ignoring the signs and trying to smoke from it.
At least they were leaving their own weed behind.
