Piotr Pavlensky is in the news again. A Russian performance artist with a long history of self-mutilation protests, he gained international attention last November when he undressed and nailed his scrotum to the cobblestones of Red Square in Moscow. According to him, this was “a metaphor for the apathy, political indifference, and fatalism of modern Russian society.” Last February he burned tires on a Sankt Petersburg bridge in support of the Kiev protests that toppled the Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovich. In his last performance, which took place yesterday, he got undressed, climbed onto the roof of a notorious psychiatric center in Moscow, and cut off one of his earlobes in protest of the forced psychiatric treatment of dissidents in Russia. As he wrote, “armed with psychiatric diagnoses, the bureaucrat in a white lab coat cuts off from society those pieces that prevent him from establishing a monolithic dictate of a single, mandatory norm for everyone.” Whether Pavlensky’s performances are artistic or not is a moot question, but his courage is exemplary without any doubt. Would that performance artists in the so-called west had his balls. For using psychiatry for political goals is hardly a Russian invention.