Performance Artist to Give Birth Live

Audience members may want to bring smelling salts and a few handkerchiefs for this one. A Brooklyn performance artist says she will give birth before a live audience at her new installation, "The Birth of Baby X," the New York Post reports. “I hope that people will see that human life itself is the most profound work of art, and that therefore giving birth, the greatest expression of life, is the highest form of art,” says performance artist Marni Kotak.

Kotak has already opened her "birthing room" at a Brooklyn gallery, and says she's ready with her "midwife, doula and wonderful husband" to give birth sometime over the next 5 weeks. Meanwhile visitors can stroll in and watch videos of audience members' faces projected onto her belly. Next up for Kotak? “Raising Baby X,” in which she will "re-contextualize the everyday act of raising a child into a work of performance art,” the gallery says. (More performance art stories.)