A possible metaphor at the root of this post is closed and open structures in the universe and what that means in relationship to growth, adaptation on all levels.

Here we extend the view to any structure which you could draw a circle around: the individual, couple, family, neighborhood, community, town, city, state, nation...

The transgressive self-aware role play of the artist tries to tinker with aspects of a closed structure to change it for the sake of... novelty, amusement, compassion, beauty, justice, catharsis, uility... The reconfiguration of the world can be pushed to all limits but there is inevitably a threshold of destruction, where the potentially adaptive structure falls apart, crumbles, dies. A human dies and so does a nation.

Jesus thinks himself the Jewish Messiah, the young lamb, while the conservatives sigh and shake their fists "this is not the way, you are messing with the way we do things". Such an innocent play by a young man becomes etched into history as a play of the Passion. They nailed this Jew to a cross and it flowered into the rite of atonement. Now we can do it in the school play.

Jesus, the existentialist role player, is condemned for being inclusive. The act of inclusion is the act of compassion, but this warrants the pious moralizers to expel him. It was just a happy accident, if we must look on it that way.

The critical difference between morality and art is that the former prioritizes exclusion, whereas the latter prioritizes inclusion. — ucarr

The dogmatic face of morality prioritizes exclusion for greater or lesser freedoms. The free flying artist prioritizes inclusion at risk but you can just as well envision such work as a great act of exclusion, being set in opposition to the collective "morality" of life's tiresome busybody bullshit. Life is just maintenance of structures until death and in that we must tweak, convulse and dance to make the boredom bearable.

The hunger artist, tired of the morality of eating, says, "not today, not tomorrow, maybe the next day". Perhaps there no food on this Earth that isn't tinged with weariness of living. The Jains have an ancient rite of ritual starvation, Sallekhana, in the name of compassion for all living things, to expunge all karmas. It might be reserved for older folks but as a statement I think it is very beautiful. Should the state make that ritual illegal?

How strange and transgressive it would be to consider suicide an art form.

Life is just maintenance of structures until death and in that we must tweak, convulse and dance to make the boredom bearable. — Nils Loc

Yes. The artist, pushing against the boundaries of what human can be, what human can do, distracts an audience from its tedium: sweet distraction, almost unbearably brief.

When we keep each other entertained with outrageous possibility, that is something seeming sweeter than righteousness, but, alas, it perishes whereas dull sanctity, everlasting to a certainty, bankrolls
existence.