What Censorship Looks Like

Obscenity Trials To Come

I just wanted to post up the above picture.
The pixellated face, the black band through where we might anticipate the nipples... it's so much more tasteful than the smut that was there before... not. It actually makes it look a though the girl participated in something incredibly illicit and disgusting, when all she did was pose nude for art. People have been doing the latter for centuries. You sort of shake your head at the sensibility of the moralists. For heaven's sakes, even a wowser like Hitler didn't ban nudes; he was willing to call modernists a bunch of degenerates, but he thought nudes were an important part of 'Germanic Art'.
Thus, this image is the face of idiotic censorship in Australia so we'd better get used to it.

While I'm updating, here is an article that's worth a read.

The public threshold for outrage is notoriously low, while the art world's taste for challenging and "subversive" work is insatiable. This has led many artists to actively seek out sensation and scandal - but Bill Henson is not of this persuasion. He obtains the full co-operation of his subjects and their families, many of whom have remained friends. Few Australian artists are so articulate or well-read, few have such a genuinely philosophical turn of mind. The worst charge that could be levelled at Henson is that he is an aesthete - with the ability to make anything at all seem beautiful.

It is not surprising that many people are shocked and disturbed by images of naked adolescents, but according to the dealer, Roslyn Oxley, the current exhibition was actually less confronting than some of Henson's previous shows at the gallery. There is no denying that it was less confronting - and far less public - than the massive retrospectives of 2005 that packed out the state galleries. After ignoring Henson for decades the self-appointed guardians of public morality are suddenly burning with rage. So what happens now? Are Henson's works to be purged from public collections and burnt? Are his books to be pulped?

A bit rhetorical, but you get the drift. The Art law Council is lining up to defend Henson.

New South Wales Law Society president Hugh Macon says the case against Henson could be very difficult to prove.

"The Crimes Act requires two things - an intention and an act," he said.

"The Act is usually fairly easily established but if the intention is to produce a work of art and solely to produce a work of art, then I can not see how a crime has been committed."

Kind of goes without saying, really. Then there's this comment which is very clear.

Like any really interesting artist, Henson has been trying his whole life to make the perfect picture. He is compelled to keep making the same work in many ways.

His images may take the viewer to an edge, to an uncomfortable place, but it's like great music or great literature. I don't look at Henson's work and see it as anything other than a broad field of possibilities.

Art and pornography are entirely separate things. It is an art gallery's job to deal with art, whether it is by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, or Bill Henson.

... And there's still no further comment from the philistine Prime Minister. If there's really going to be an obscenity trial, I think it's going to get pretty ugly.