The definition of what constitutes art now apparently contains giant roving robots, terrifying autonomous skeletons and flaming metal snakes. These five pieces of art may sound awesome, until they're killing you and everyone you love.

Most Fine Arts majors will tell you, while serving your Double-Tall Latte, that all true artwork is dangerous. What they will not tell you, however, is that in some cases it could also win a war single-handedly.

The Fire Shower

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The Fire Shower is one of the many interactive exhibits that combine audience participation, home-brew technology, and intense bodily harm by the San Francisco art collective known as SEEMEN. The Fire Shower is a small, enclosed cage whose bars are equipped with high velocity rotors that spew flame at increasingly insane speeds until the volunteer is engulfed in a miniature fire tornado aimed solely at their exposed flesh. Why, you might ask? Because art is awesome. That's why.

The artist claims:

Kal Spelitech, the creator of the fire shower explains, "Working with fire is like playing with a wild animal. It is quite mesmerizing, but at any second it can turn on us. Using fire as an art medium always has a certain unpredictability and risk involved. On the highest level, my artwork involves pushing the envelope between terror and play and seeing how much I can involve audiences with a medium that may kill them ... I began to think about my work and what I could do there that would bring people closer to fire as an art or existential/transcendent experience ... Fear of death has always been a major cause of social change, and challenging people's fear of fire is always interesting."

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Our explanation:

We have to admit, Kal is pretty plain in what he's trying to do here: Light people on fire. He even admits freely that burning is a hilarious game to him, and that he really enjoys people's fear of death. Nobody can blame Kal for misleading us about exactly what his horrifying machines do. Indeed, it seems as if he's actually trying to warn you away. Instead, blame the art crowd for interpreting these statements as the main thesis points of a revolutionary performance piece and not, more accurately, as a sociopath's description of a "flamethrower prison for the innocent."

Danger level:

The Fire shower is built to a set specification. If you aren't grown to the exact proportions it was intended to hold, there are no safety precautions. If you're too fat, hey, no problem! It'll burn those unsightly pounds right off of you in a frighteningly literal fashion.

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That may seem like a joke, but seriously, burns are not actually that uncommon. People frequently emerge from the shower "missing hair and smoking." Although to be fair, the Fire Shower does rely solely on volunteers--you have to actually walk up to it and step inside, even after it's explained to you that it is a walk-in barbecue for fat people. It's not exactly going to sneak into your home and replace your normal bathing station with its desperate, fiery embrace. Well, not that's been proven anyway.