Surely, LaBeouf had done himself and the piece no favors: He had been arrested after shoving a man in front of the camera, for one thing. Though a piece of public art had been shut down, ostensibly because of a coordinated effort by trolls and extremists that included dozens of bomb and shooting threats, the media greeted the closure with amusement, and even a few sneers.
“It’s disgraceful for a museum to behave in that manner, to have such contempt for an artist and an artist’s work.” “It was diabolical,” Turner told BuzzFeed News in March. Ten days later, citing a “serious and ongoing public safety hazard,” MoMI announced that it had closed "He Will Not Divide Us." The artists replaced the livestream with static text that stated, gravely, “The Museum has abandoned us.” LaBeouf was right to be concerned about the future of the piece. I am seeking help in maintaining our integrity as artists We are being used as a political hockey puck Instead, LaBeouf wrote, a city council member named Jimmy Van Bramer was prevailing on Carl Goodman, the museum’s director, to shut the piece down behind the artists’ backs. But that wasn't what had gotten him so hot. Since opening, the piece had been set upon by internet trolls and neo-Nazis. In the email, mostly uncapitalized and formatted like stanzas of free verse, LaBeouf alleged a campaign of subversion against his work. That camera fed a round-the-clock livestream video. Titled "He Will Not Divide Us," the work consisted of a single security camera fixed to an exterior wall of the museum, above which was printed in four lines of bold black letters the name of the piece - a mantra that passersby were encouraged to chant into the camera. LaBeouf and two other artists, Luke Turner and Nastja Säde Rönkkö, had recently debuted a piece at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York City. On January 30, 10 days after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the actor and artist Shia LaBeouf sent an aggrieved email to the American Civil Liberties Union.
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