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A couple of months ago, the Helsinki Court of Appeal denied an appeal by Finnish artist Ulla Karttunen, who was found guilty of distributing child pornography after exhibiting her installation Virgin-Whore Church. The work featured suggestive images of children that the artist had found on the Internet. This ruling ended a case that had begun some two years ago when the police shut down the opening of Karttunen’s exhibition and confiscated the installation. At the court hearing, the artist tried to argue that the exhibition’s press release had stated very clearly that the work was critical of the eroticisation of children and that her aim had been to draw attention to the easy availability of child pornography. However, the court, which clearly did not want to make an exception for a case which might later serve as a loophole for actual offenders, dealt with the artist as it would with any paedophile. The whole process left both the artist and the organizers of the exhibition bewildered – nobody was at all prepared for such consequences.My question is, Why? Not why the authorities will always prosecute artists who push the sore spot of whatever witch-hunt is current – that question does not really need answering. Rather, I wonder why artists are usually so surprised by the inevitable prosecution and so rarely plan for it while developing their work? I remember a conversation that I had about Karttunen’s case with Norwegian artist Morten Traavik, who himself provoked a lot of debate with his project Miss Landmine, a beauty contest organized for women who had been maimed in landmine explosions. Morten introduced the concept of ‘social engineering’ in art, saying that artists who want to raise questions with their work should be ready for what happens if they really succeed in their aim. What are the methods and means you can use in dealing with the public’s reaction? Can PR techniques for disaster planning and damage control be used as a part of an artwork, a next step in the artistic process? Another example: Some time ago the Finnish theatre director Kristian Smeds staged a beloved national classic, the novel The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna, in a spirit of strong social criticism. The performance ended with a video in which images of the country’s celebrities and well-known politicians are shot at. This gesture attracted unprecedented attention to the theatre production, both from mainstream media and the tabloids. The debate, however, did not rise much above the level of ‘How dare you shoot at an image of the president?’ Surprisingly, the director was not ready for this ‘low quality’ discussion and chose to stop dealing with the press altogether. The fact that he never commented on the discussion did not help develop it further or address the questions he had really intended to ask.The problem with such examples is that when something goes wrong, an artist stops being an artist and becomes a victim. The creative process stops as soon as the context becomes hostile and the rules of the art world no longer apply. I believe that planning for society’s reaction to a provocative artwork can help develop its meaning at a deeper level. It is a test of the work in a different context. Why do artists, except for maybe the most practical creators of street art, still expect the reaction to be a thoughtful, self-critical discussion? Court rulings and angry babblings from the tabloid press are far more common.On the other hand, some artists do treat the public debate that follows an original creation as part of the artwork. To name one: the art group Voina (War) from Moscow, notorious for its provocative actions, such as Hanging (a few gay activists and immigrant workers pretending to be executed in a grocery store) and Fuck for the Bear Cub Successor (a public orgy in the Museum of Biology on the eve of the Russian presidential elections). One of their latest stunts was to project an image of a huge green skull and bones onto the Russian House of Parliament. Now, what is interesting about this group is that it is able to manipulate the blogosphere to heat up the debate and raise awareness after each of their actions, which might otherwise remain unnoticed in scandal-rich Russia. A blog entry posted by one of the group’s members after the action in the Museum of Biology received one million hits within 24 hours after being posted and was on the top ten Russian search engines. In this way, Voina’s work simultaneously becomes a commentary on the political situation and the nature of social debate – a society’s desire to be scandalized, to condemn and to prosecute.Eva Neklyaeva is the festival director of BALTIC CIRCLE, International Theatre Festival, Helsinki