I'm just saying I'd be totally aware it's an art exhibit and not do anything stupid because of potential hidden cameras.
Seems the "result" of the experiment is conveniently implying that humans by nature are evil which is just not true.
I’m not sure how you’ve arrived at your conclusion, irregardless of my feelings about the innate evilness of humanity.
You go to bed in safety wake up in safety you are highly unlikely to be randomly harmed.
What's more likely that humans aren't innately evil or that they are acting nice because of laws and repercussions?
Taking what the author says at face value, the goal was "See what the public would do to a human if given tools and unrestricted access/allowance for 6 hours", and the conclusion is up to the audience and future viewers/readers, rather than the author trying to steer people into some predefined conclusion.
One way you could see it is "all humans are inherently evil" but that's not the way I see it, as the audience seems to eventually be split up in one "nice" group trying to stop the "not nice" group from acting out.
Seems almost impossible.
In this case, you write a note and let people do whatever. Once you see someone that cutting their skin is OK, I'm pretty sure you'd feel OK with whatever you had in mind.
The idea that this says something profound about how people will 'naturally gravitate' towards violent or dehumanising behaviour is ridiculous.
Just to be 100% clear, she never asked people to "do anything" nor "I won't react", this is what was said to the audience/participants:
Instructions:
There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.
Performance.
I am the object.
During this period I take full responsibility.
Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am).[6](And of course, at any moment she could just say "OK that's enough, I'm stopping this early, please stop" and it would be over - it's not like everyone would say "Nah, we are going to keep abusing you until 2am as originally agreed".)
But unless you literally believe in evil spirits, demons or devils, "evil" is not a thing that exists, it's an emergent property of human behavior and as such can be explained by pyschology and sociology (e.g. as in the Milgram experiment where "evil" is the product of the participant's desire to comply with the experimenter's instructions to the detriment of a fake subject separated from both by a wall with an intercom).
Studies of human behaviors in crisis situations such as after natural disasters causing a collapse of infrastructure and social hierarchies likewise demonstrate a tendency towards mutual support and solidarity, quite to the contrary of what popular media would have you believe as the norm in the "post-apocalypse".
It seems that human nature (because humans are a social species, i.e. we rely on each other as a group rather than natural defenses of our own bodies) is cooperative and it takes social hierarchies and complex systems in order for us to do "evil". Heck, a huge part of military training ever since the modern age consists of dehumanizing the enemy to overcome our natural hesistation against causing harm to other humans. Even the nazi police officers who volunteered to participate in the mass killings of Jews in Poland mostly came up with narratives for themselves to justify their actions as humanitarian (e.g. we know of one such officer who insisted on only shooting children and waiting until their mothers were killed by his comrades so killing the child was an act of "mercy" - turning what was clearly an "evil" act by anyone's standards into something he could justify to himself).