One of San Miguel's quiet oases is a former convent, now referred to by locals as Bellas Artes, as in "You can buy chamber music festival tickets at Bellas Artes." It's also known as Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramírez or El Nigromante. I lived here a year before I realized that all three names belonged to the same place. It's a branch of the Palacio de Bellas Artes of Mexico City, and provides gallery space, classrooms for art students, a concert hall, and a small cafe, and it features a mural by David Alfaro Siqueiros.

The other day, an installation by Japanese artiest Sae Otomo caught my eye. She titled it Es Necesario lo Innecesario (Necessary or Unnecessary?). It makes a statement about how our consumption affects the environment; in particular, what we do with stuff after we've used it.

The panel below contains items she found while walking along the highway to Querétaro. The objects she found must have taken her all of five minutes to collect. The amount of trash thrown along highways is shocking to visitors from rich countries.

Consisting mostly of discarded containers, the panel contains one that is disturbing:

This bottle once held highly corrosive muriatic acid. Anyone coming in contact with small amounts of residue might suffer severe burns.

Protest art needs to have more impact, in my view, than a collection of common litter glued to a square or muslin. In the panel below, Sae Otomo delivers, in a work called Afterwards, Where Do They Go?

Where do what go? This work consists of used disposable diapers and sanitary napkins, again found along the highway. Repulsive, shocking—who wants to walk into a gallery to be confronted by something like this? But for me, it succeeds in sharply bringing home the message: Collectively we humans are slobs, throwing disgusting wastes anywhere without regard for the health of the planet or for our fellows.

Art with a strong message. I wouldn't hang it in my living room, though.