Art

The NSW government have released a set of recommendations that would place responsibility for the work of a grubby network of international paedophiles and child exploiters on a handful of innocent visual artists.

Speaking at a press conference on Tuesday the Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the NSW government would support new legislation that makes a “clear legal distinction between pornography and art” in order to protect victims and make it easier for police to prosecute cases of child pornography and exploitation

With plans to scrap the defence of “artistic merit” while asking artists to fork out up to $500 per image for Commonwealth classification, Hatzistergos’ recommendations are taking a stab at a group, who up until 2008 had stayed fairly shy of scrutiny in Australia.

Continue reading "Art is the not the enemy in the fight against child porn" »

It’s Friday @ The Punch.

Edvard Munch’s iconic artwork ‘The Scream’ was stolen from the National Art Museum of Oslo. After the painting was recovered, one of the two thieves, Paal Enger, went on to become a legitimate art dealer.

If Green Day sang that the Jesus of American suburbia is a lie, Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa) offers a surreal Aussie equivalent: the Jesus of our suburbia is a regular guy, eating a pie, wearing a tie, with a third eye.

Mombassa was a member of iconic Australian rock band Mental As Anything before becoming one of Australia’s most recognisable visual artists and helping to establish the fame and fortune of the Mambo surfwear brand.

The release of Murray Waldren’s beautifully-produced biography of Mombassa, The Mind and Times of Reg Mombassa, highlights just how prominent Christian, or ‘neo-Christian’, themes are in his artwork.

Lauded as a pop culture artist, Mombassa self-identifies in a more religious fashion: “It’s like being a priest. To some extent, it’s a calling”, he tells Waldren. His “Self portrait with beard and plastic ring”, painted last year, is an obvious Christ-figure, with the ring as a halo.

Continue reading "The Australian Jesus of Reg Mombassa" »

The proposal this year to remove the artistic defence from the NSW proposed legislation on child abuse, which includes child pornography and exploitation, is not particularly about censoring artists. 

In fact, the Australia Council for the Arts believes that the proposal, which will harmonise NSW laws with the Commonwealth laws on the definitions of child pornography, has the potential to be advantageous to genuine artistic expression. 

Mention art and pornography together, and people immediately position themselves at opposite ends of the room.

Continue reading "Why artists should not fear child protection reforms" »

One of the strongest arguments against the exploitation of children by photographers is the potential for long term damage to the child.

What a child may “consent” to when they’re 10-years-old, might make them feel incredibly uncomfortable when they’re 17. Most of the time we don’t get to ask them.

But the Tate Modern in London has just been forced to withdraw a picture of Hollywood star Brooke Shields, taken when she was 10. It’s a rare case where we can see how the subject’s life has turned out.

Continue reading "Is it child porn if the subject is famous?" »

TO a graffiti vandal, it’s the equivalent of a madman running through the Louvre with a knife at night slashing the Mona Lisa and other canvases. A secret squirt squad is systematically defacing illegal “artworks” daubed along Melbourne’s train lines by painting the letters “CTCV” over the top.

The anonymous vigilantes are bombarding hundreds of sites across the rail network with their simple tag, prompting cries of foul play from graffiti crews.

Outraged vandals have accused employees of train operator Connex, and also the transit police, of somehow orchestrating the blitz as some sort of bizarre “tit for tat” campaign to wipe out street art.

Continue reading "Are Victorian authorities fighting graffiti with graffiti?" »

The Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow with a local community church has opened a new exhibition that originally aimed to “reclaim the Bible as a sacred text”.

.

In a somewhat unorthodox way of achieving this end they have left a Bible open at the exhibition inviting people to write whatever they want in it.

“If you feel you have been excluded from the Bible, please write your way back into it,” asks the gallery.

Continue reading "Bible bashing is easy, but would artists touch Islam?" »

In 2007, for the first time in its history, The Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning was awarded to a cartoonist whose submission consisted of both print cartoons and animations.

America’s editorial cartoonists, already under siege from dwindling newspaper circulation, syndication and political correctness, were quick to circle the wagons around their craft. “What next…the Family Guy gets a Pulitzer?” bleated USA Today’s Scott Stantis.

They miss the point. Anybody who’s ever picked up a pixel and tried to churn out an animation knows how laborious, how mind-numbingly tedious, how frustrating a process it can be.

Continue reading "An animated discussion about political cartoons" »