Art student Kevin ‘Kayvon’ Edson is charged with making a false bomb threat on the one year anniversary of the Boston bombings

Text Thomas Gorton

If Kevin Edson was looking for fame, he's ended up with infamy. The 25 year-old art school student and performance artist, who also goes by the name Kayvon, has just been arrested in relation to a suspected bomb hoax on the one-year anniversary of the Boston bombing. Edson allegedly left a rice cooker filled with confetti on the finish line of the Boston Marathon – as in, the exact site where the bombs went off last year, killing three and injuring more than 260. You can watch a video of Edson at the marathon here:

A close friend and classmate has suggested that Edson had struggled with mental illness, but it seems equally likely that the stunt might just be another performance piece. If nothing else, the whole incident – in which Edson, wearing a black sunhat and a veil, yelled "Boston Strong" before planting the backpack – smells exactly like the kind of thing an art school student would do. Was this hoax just an artistic stunt? Edson has posted some YouTube videos under the moniker "Nat Sel", including one where he describes himself as "a fashion designer, an entrepreneur, a performance artist, a mental patient, a blogger bloggorist, a jailbird, a college dropout, and a drag queen":

In this sub-par Ryan Trecartin video, Edson, clad in a straitjacket inside a padded room, shouts, "I am fucking famous on the internet and they don't understand!"

In the run-up to the Boston Marathon, Edson was busy posting fanart of Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to his website, with slogans like "Sexy Until Proven Innocent". "Heart of gold!" Edson writes on his page. "I’d run 26.2 miles fur (sic) you!"

A day before the Boston Marathon, he uploaded this photo to his Facebook page, adding the hashtag #BloggoristAttack:

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