Self-Mutilation, Seriously?

In an age in which so many troubled teens and young adults engage in “cutting,” how can The Times responsibly run a piece extolling artist Ron Athey’s performances, which feature him suspending himself by hooks through the back, impaling himself on a torture device and crawling through glass (“In Extremis and in My Life,” by Kateri Butler, The Art Issue, Jan. 28)? Athey needs psychiatric intervention or an old-fashioned Pentecostal exorcism of the spirits inhabiting him--not to be glorified and taken seriously in West. Shame on you for printing such rubbish.

Laura Warfield

Newbury Park

I’m not sure if I can decide which is more plaintive: that West would profile anyone whose artistic technique can be described with the phrase “teases a rope of pearls out of his ass” or that The Times would presumably pay honest-to-God legal tender to the writer who memorializes such goings-on with the charming sentence, “I burbled with wonder upon gazing at Ron’s sunburst-tattooed anus.”

I’ve lived too long . . . God take me now.

Bob Bennett

Costa Mesa