6 Artists Who Were Banned, Censored or Arrested by Conservatives

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/149395/6_artists_who_were_banned%2C_censored_or_arrested_by_conservatives?page=entire

6 Artists Who Were Banned, Censored or Arrested by Conservatives

With a brief reprieve after the ‘90s culture wars, it looks as though the tide is shifting back in the direction of visual art censorship.

January 3, 2011 |

With a brief reprieve after the ‘90s culture wars, it looks as though the tide is shifting back in the direction of visual art censorship, particularly with the incoming GOP Congress and its disdain for expression that is not squeaky clean. And the war is being fought from the halls of Congress -- as with the much-publicized Smithsonian dismissal of “A Fire in My Belly” -- to perpetually conservative points of consumerism -- as with retail outlets’ disdain for Kanye West’s album cover painted by American artist George Condo. Most nefarious are those instances when museums, galleries and other outlets for art practice self-censorship, preemptively or not, to avoid controversy. The very last place artists should fear morality police are the institutions that are meant to support them, and the willful abnegation of free speech is dangerous indeed.

Here are six artists who were banned, censored or arrested, evoking controversy and setting precedents in visual art:

1. Frederick MacMonnies, Copley Square, 1894. To our modern eyes, sculptor Frederick MacMonnies’ "Bacchante and Infant Faun" could hardly be more innocuous. A naked but desexualized image of the Roman wine deity, cast in bronze and holding a child, its litheness seems countered only by its gaiety. But in 1854, when architect Follen McKim tried to mount it in the courtyard of the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, a huge scandal erupted around the very qualities that seem so innocent today. The statue’s “drunken indecency” greatly offended the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, it seemed, and they had enough pull in the city that McKim thought better of his gift and shipped the Bacchus down to liberal New York. It resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to this day, and partly as a result of the uproar surrounding it, MacMonnies became world-famous for the sculpture.

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3. Blu, MoCa, 2010. It’s remarkable (and confusing) that MoCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who made his name in New York City by displaying some of the most interesting and innovative contemporary art around in his eponymous gallery for nearly 15 years, would ever censor anything. But that’s exactly what happened in December, after he commissioned the celebrated and controversial Italian graffiti artist Blu to paint a large-scale mural at the museum’s entrance. Their contract was signed without a preliminary sketch, as is Blu’s standard modus operandi. And so, while Deitch attended Art Basel in Miami, Blu worked on his piece: a huge painting of the coffins of war casualties, with dollar bills instead of American flags draped over them.

Blu does not shrink when it comes to making strong statements with his work -- using the dollar bill as a common theme, he’s commented on the varying tentacles of corporate greed since 2000. According to an email conversation between the artist and longtime graffiti archivist Henry Chalfant, Deitch requested Blu paint a different mural over the coffins, “suggesting he would have preferred a piece that ‘invites people to come in the museum’. I told him that i will not to do that, for obvious reasons, and that probably I was not the artist best suited for this task.”

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6. Rose Bochovski, Second Life, 2010. It seems odd that art censorship should bleed into virtual reality, a mirror existence built on pixels inside the Internet. But this past June, when the video artist Rose Bochovski exhibited her computer-graphic, 3-D film Susa Bubble in a Second Life art gallery, it was promptly removed, with the censors citing Second Life’s rules disallowing nudity beyond spaces with an “adult” rating. The images, viewable below, depict a young girl who is naked but not in any real provocative way and is completely devoid of sexualization, whether in the rendering or in the context. Real 21st-century problems, these, but they illustrate the vast illogic of censorship -- a couple of keystrokes on the Internet and anyone can view anything from real-life corpses to hardcore pornography. And yet in an online gaming system, a woman whose art piece is moderately less naked than Henry Darger’s cherubic hermaphrodites gets the boot? Surreal. Go here to read Bochovski’s response.

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[Generic Other]

1. The video I made of Rose's banned work

Rose is a personal friend of mine. Her art is amazing. Internationally known cinema director Peter Greenaway came to her defense. Like a good DU organizer, I started a demonstration in Second Life when her work was banned there.

These are my videos:
The Censor: SL7B Bans Rose Borchovski's "The Kiss" for Nudity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zLFTWElWus

Susa Bubble: The Art of Rose Borchovski
http://www.vimeo.com/6028429

[Omar4Dems]

2. A little niche in the amateur art world demonstrates the "self-censorship" rubbish

I've been a long-time admirer of artists at deviantArt, a site designed for artists and aspiring artists to showcase their work. The categories cover just about any visual art that can be uploaded as an image file, and there are plenty of seasoned professionals as well as beginners at the site.

DeviantArt allows total nudity in photographs, and even has a "fetish" category. However, when it comes to drawn subjects, the rules get very murky and strange.

Now, I couldn't care less if I never see any sexualized drawings of underage people, and I'm not really a big fan of cartoons, either, but I am concerned about the bizarre contortions that site goes through when it comes to establishing rules for that category.

The staff at deviantArt argues that showing cartoon characters in a sexual way constitutes "underage erotica." In other words, showing the Powerpuff Girls nude violates child pornography laws, since the Powerpuff Girls are depicted as minors. This is laughably absurd--as one artist put it, "Now do we have to check the IDs of every cartoon character? How old is Bugs Bunny, anyway?"

Not only that, but child pornography laws were established to protect minors from being exploited. If someone draws a naked cartoon pic of Alice in Wonderland, no minor is being exploited! Maybe someone who knows the law could jump in here, but I seem to recall the courts agree with this.

The site deletes such drawings even if the character is drawn as an adult! (Repeated violations will lead to the artist being banned from the site for life.)

Now, drawings of "adult" characters are supposedly allowed, but if they're considered too "hot," they get banned, too. Take http://katikut.deviantart.com/gallery/?offset=144#/d1f3rsm">this drawing, for example (the man and woman are fully nude, and intercourse is strongly implied).
(You won't see the drawing in the above link unless you have a deviantArt account.) The artist cropped her original to meet deviantArt's standards: showing the man's buttocks would have depicted the two characters' genitals to have been in contact (even though no genitals are seen). *Roll eyes here.* If you dig through the comments, you'll find links to the original drawing (one link still works), which is described by most of the comments as depicting "lovemaking," and not licentious sex, and I agree. The artist is a young woman from France, and she cannot understand the absurd levels of American-style censorship on the site.

Copyright infringement is not an issue, as deviantArt has allowed millions of "fan art" drawings to be posted, without incident. Moreover, deviantArt has censored sexualized "original" cartoon drawings--ones where the characters involved were not under copyright. Not only that, but violent drawings (except perhaps extremely grizzly scenes) are given a pass. I've come across countless "goth" drawings of bloodied cartoon characters. Violence = a-okay. Sex = filth. It's the American Way.

Here's the rule:
http://help.deviantart.com/248/

Discussions at deviantArt on the issue:
http://nori-mature.deviantart.com/journal/20898683/
http://news.deviantart.com/article/116584/
http://rueme.deviantart.com/journal/36432140/

[bigmonkey]

3. Does the WCTU really count as a conservative organization?

I'm not trying to be contentious here, but can't they be seen as a progressive initiative, albeit a misguided one?