It was a showstopper that could have stopped the show. A slaughtered bull. Five hundred litres of animal blood. Sixty artists, academics and musicians in a three-hour ritual that builds to a frenzied free-for-all, performers plunging into the bull’s carcass and writhing in its entrails. It was done in the name of art: a performance piece titled 150.Action by Hermann Nitsch, on the bill of Dark Mofo 2017.

Appalled, more than 20,000 people signed a petition demanding the performance be cancelled. Animal rights activists threatened to kidnap the bull and take it to safety (ignoring the fact that the beast was sourced from a local abattoir and would die regardless). Leigh Carmichael, creative director of Dark Mofo, and his boss David Walsh, founder of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), received more than 100 threats; and that’s just counting those serious enough to warrant police attention. “We were sent letters saying ‘If the bull dies, you die,’ that type of stuff,” Carmichael says. “It was pretty confronting.”