Something to add to this.

Take, for example, the recent death of the artist
Balthus.  In his earlier days, Balthus' work was
considered so erotic as to border on being
pornographic.  And yet his death this past week was
considered to be a loss to the art world.

Under a Rudy Giuliani, his art works might never have
been exhibited.

Here are three paragraphs from the NY Times bio on the
man:

"But above all, Balthus was known for paintings of
equivocal figure subjects, very young women in poses
or situations that were regarded as enigmatic or
suggestive or both. Often these subjects were caught
between dream and waking. Sometimes there were more
explicitly sexual elements, and these caused a minor
scandal as early as 1934, when he had his first
one-man show at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

"Though never wholly discarded, the element of erotic
provocation became more oblique in his later work. ("I
used to want to shock," he once told a friend, "but
now it bores me.") In 1955, he even agreed to tone
down an erotic incident in "The Street" (1933), a
painting that had been bought by James Thrall Soby,
one of his earliest American admirers, who later
bequeathed it to the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan.

""I really don't understand why people see the
paintings of girls as Lolitas," he told the chief art
critic of The New York Times, Michael Kimmelman, in
1996. "My little model is absolutely untouchable to
me. Some American journalist said he found my work
pornographic. What does he mean? Everything now is
pornographic. Advertising is pornographic. You see a
young woman putting on some beauty product who looks
like she's having an orgasm. I've never made anything
pornographic. Except perhaps `The Guitar Lesson.' " "

You can read the full bio here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/arts/19BALT.html



--- T W Moran <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>         Nothing new here. If your going to ask for a
> dialog, then ask for a
> fair one. Not just an answer to a belligerent press.
> The people need to
> be educated to understand that an icon and an
> institution can be
> criticized. Till then your going no where. Your
> dialog is just so much
> shouting in the wind.
>         Tw


=====
Indigo Nights
[log in to unmask]


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