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More provocative images …
By RickMeasham | July 6, 2008
At the end of May I wrote about the censorship of Bill Henson’s artwork. It all worked out in the end: the images were returned to the gallery and the gallery changed the exhibit to appointment only (I assume to keep out potential trouble-makers).
But now it’s news again. Art Monthly Australia have decided to run a picture of a nude child on their latest magazine cover to protest the censorship of nude children in art. And KRudd has decided to jump back into the issue.
“… frankly I can’t stand this stuff,” he says to the ABC Insiders program. “How can anyone assume that a little child of six years old, eight, 10, 12, somehow is able to make that decision for themselves?” Well that’s a good question, and one I answered last time this was an issue: it’s called responsible parenting.
Read on to see the cover and introduction to Donald Brook’s article “Art and (not or) Pornography”, or read the Editorial and notes on the cover at Art Monthly Australia
03 Art and (not or) Pornography DONALD BROOK
Issue 211, July, 2008
From time to time there is a great fuss made about whether some object is a work of art or pornographic. Experts are invited to testify, and mostly ridiculed for their trouble. Witnesses with no expertise at all are treated more courteously; often being commended for their assistance in establishing a community standard. This manoeuvre is prejudiced in two ways. First, those without expertise are not invited to testify in statistically significant numbers, and their opinions are mainly selected and filtered through the calculating minds of lawyers. Second, and perhaps more importantly, no conservative judge and jury seriously believes that a change of mind will ever be the appropriate response to evidence that a more radical opinion than their own is the community standard. (Or vice-versa, for more a radically minded judiciary and a more conservative community standard). All these good people are determined to do the right thing, and no evidence that in the domain of nutrition (for example) eating beef is the community standard will persuade a vegetarian to approve of it.
Taken from the Art Monthly Australia website.
Topics: Issues, News, Politics | 1 Comment »
July 7th, 2008 at 10:01 am
One of the more regrettable things, as Martin and Jolley say in their Art Monthly article, is that “every photographic act is now more readily viewable through the prism of victim and abuser, rather than artist and subject.”
That’s an extremely negative outcome to the Henson furore: to have subjects of art dictated by those with extremely narrow artistic sensibilities. If good art were defined by how comfortable it makes us feel, then what a tiny world we would all be living in!