Is This Art?!?!

Costa Rican artist, Guillermo Vargas aka Habacuc, took his "art" to inconceivably cruel levels last year in the form of animal suffering. Vargas paid a few local boys in Nicaragua to help him to capture a dog and he then tied this dog in an art gallery where it was on display for days without food or water, until it died. This was his concept of "art", entitled "You are what you read", which was "written" on the wall in dog food. This cruelty to the poor animal didn't earn him any punishment for his misdeeds, however. Quite the contrary. Instead of being punished for these actions, he has been selected to represent Costa Rica in the "Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008", a visual art gathering of selected artists.

Is this so-called "art" really what should be held up as representative of a country and on a lesser scale, "rewarded" at all? This horrible and inhumane treatement of animals shouldn't be condoned! The reasoning behind it was to supposedly show the suffering and make people realize that while they were looking at it and perhaps feeling pity in an art gallery, that they would not stop and help the same dog had it been in the alley behind their house or in their own neighborhood. While the message might be true, to actually allow it to happen and overtly take actions to ensure the suffering of this poor creature are just terrible. It's not art. It's just ridiculous cruelty and hard to imagine that someone could be so cruel as to do something like this, all in the name of art. If he were really trying to help prevent cruelty to animals and make people think, there are many organizations dedicated to such purposes that he could have supported, worked with, or created artwork for/about. I may not be the quintessential visual art critic, but I don't consider this art at all.
[Although there has been much said and written about this, I haven't found absolutely conclusive evidence that this did happen, though I do believe that it did.]