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Ever since the lifting of the Lady Chatterley ban in 1963, the police and public morality have been uneasy bedfellows.
Elton John, who has a vast photography collection, unwittingly fell foul of the law when a portrait of two young girls dancing by Nan Goldin, chronicler of New York night life, was loaned to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. It was dramatically seized before the Crown Prosecution Service decided that it wasn't “indecent” after all. Last year, the Tate Modern had to pull a portrait of Brooke Shields by Richard Prince.
This week it has been the turn of the late photographer Bob Carlos Clarke, whose work is being shown at the Little Black Gallery in once bohemian Chelsea. In his commercial work for magazines and ads, Carlos Clarke was stylised and sexy; in his private work (for which there is a great market), his imagination runs riot and is admittedly edgy.
I was younger and perhaps more shockable when I went to a private view of his work a few years back: I didn't know where to look because his installation of scantily clad women turned out to look so life-like because they were, in fact, alive.
A spate of residents' complaints has now brought a letter from the police to the gallery. “My assessment is that Whip Girl is acceptable but I have some concerns about Tite Street,” wrote the poor officer charged with checking out the show. “Tite Street appears to show a man having rear entry sex with a woman who is bent double and not wearing any knickers. Of course, this is not the appropriate place to have a debate about art versus pornography. It is my assessment that Tite Street should not be able to be clearly viewed from the street. I strongly advise that Tite Street is moved.”
There's a delicious, almost Pinteresque quality to those last lines. Yet while the officer denies wanting “to have a debate about art versus pornography”, that is what the police are now asked to do with alarming regularity.
To demand that art is not just good but “decent” too is a new compulsion, and one peculiar to a heavily surveilled modern Britain at that. If taste becomes a matter for law, where do you draw the line? Should galleries, like films, be forced to issue ratings?
By the values that banned the Richard Prince photograph (in fact, a photograph of a photograph taken by Shields's mother), what about Why I am not a Dancer, Tracey Emin's video which recounts her brutalising coming of age in Margate?
In Berlin, the Helmut Newton institute, a monument to his love of bondage and appreciation of the female form, is handily next to the zoo. Patrick Demarchelier's racy retrospective was seen by tens of thousands of Parisians.
The Little Black Gallery may be pushing its luck with its rear window-style installation. But the police should stick to tackling crime, not policing taste.
Brits made great villains well before Hollywood
There's nothing worse than when a National Treasure says something really daft. Dame Helen Mirren, who won an Oscar for The Queen, says that Hollywood should stop casting Brits as either “snooty” or bad.
“I think it's rather unfortunate that the villain in every movie is always British,” opines Mirren, who clearly missed Carey Mulligan in An Education, Colin Firth in A Single Man and Ralph Fiennes in The Hurt Locker.
Mirren recently did a memorable turn as the villainous British newspaper editor in State of Play and is next seen in a film of The Tempest in a female portrayal of the if not evil, then definitely ambivalent magician, the usurped Duke of Milan, Prospero. Shakespeare: why did he write so many characters who are British, aristocratic and bad?
Pity the poor son of such star parents
After battling drug addiction for the past 18 years, poor Cameron Douglas, son of Michael Douglas, is now heading to jail with a conviction for drug dealing. His dad's letter to the judge claimed CPI (celebrity-progeny-itus) as a defence: “I have some idea of the pressure of finding your own identity with a famous father. I'm not sure I can comprehend it with two generations to deal with.”
The marriage of Cameron's parents by all accounts made Fatal Attraction look dull. He has inherited the hangers-on and more angst than a 31-year-old deserves. I would have let him off and told him to move somewhere where no one has ever seen Wall Street.
Time for Lib-Dems to Let The Sunshine In
Musical junkie that I am, I adored the revival of Hair. Amid the raves, the critics who disliked it seem to have reviewed the hippy movement itself — and to have found it compromised and pointless. If 40-odd years on, hippies still inspire such strong feelings, surely that's rather a testament to their power?
This week Guido Fawkes, the blogosphere's chief anarchist, writes that Conservative Central Office considers the Lib-Dems “beardy weirdies” and has made a film cutting Cleggmania with the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour.
As a term of political scorn, “sandals” is getting more airtime than Sam Cam's black nail varnish or Zara shoes. Would it be a step too far for the Lib-Dems to adopt Let The Sunshine In as their campaign song
Reader views (1)
Hey Olivia,
The problem here is that the art world increasingly does not distinguish between legal art and illegal art (and, in fact, to stay edgy, they must occasionally cross that line). The problem with Richard Prince's photograph wasn't that it exploited Shields, the problem is that pedophiles cannot be encouraged to believe that if they produce similar work it may be acceptable under the broader umbrella of art, and will then use art as an umbrella for their activities...um, and here I'll reference the recent goings-on of the Catholic Church). You can't give license to artists to break the law any more than you can give it to priests--children are particularly vulnerable to predation and we deem them a specifically protected class. So the problem with your argument is that artist/pornographers are not specifically being persecuted (lots of pornography and art continues to be produced), artists who produce illegal types of pornography are being policed with great diligence. To argue for a specific exception to this is tantamount to arguing for less policing of religious bodies.
- Spiritual Curator, Elsewhere, 22/04/2010 16:28
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