Prithee, do tell thine humble servant... How the heck is this art??

Forgive me for my ignorance but can someone please explain to me how placing whipped cream on a naked woman, then inviting the crowd to lick it off of her is art, and not some giant orgy of a sort. I understand the want to re-create art made originally by the only African American member of the Fluxus movement, however I simply don't understand the choice of piece, nor do I understand the piece itself. Does it push boundaries? Does it add a new frontier to art? Does it play with line, shape, color, form? Anything other than a sense of perversion and titillation? Clifford Owens, the artist behind the re-created work "quotes early African American performance art in part to shed light on overlooked areas of art history." How exactly does a work like this "raise obvious questions about the canon and its intransigent blind spots." I understand that taking photographs of what was originally a performance piece alters the general mode of work and thus the way in which it's perceived, but that doesn't make the piece itself any more accessible to me. How is someone licking whipped cream off another persons body art? How is a photograph of a nude male putting whipped cream on a nude female art??
However, enough ranting for the moment, the assignment given was to discuss instances where items hun did or did not compliment one another based on how they were installed. In my opinion Patricia Brace's "Summer of Love" video installation was not complimented by, nor did it compliment Traci Molloy's "The on Absence Project." The combination of photo and film do not work together, especially since the viewer must shift their vantage point from a viewing spot close to the ground to an area on eye level. Nor do the two compliment one another in terms of content or subject matter. In fact, they seem to have very little to do with one another. Now, in class, we heard that the video was placed there due to conflicting interests with another piece in the film room, however, I feel that there could have been other areas of installation which would have suited it better. For example, since the theme, color-wise, of the film is mostly white,  and it was low to the ground, perhaps it would have done better placed near the all white statue of the man with the mustache.
I felt that all in all the pieces on the left hand wall of the Red Gallery, the human figures and Hanneline Rogeberg's "Big Hide" compliment one another well due to the nature of the subject matter and the manner in which they were executed. In addition they were all hung around the same visual level.