Archive for January 2011
The New Puritans
News this morning that a charity art exhibition at Sydney Children’s Hospital has “collapsed” after hospital officials viewed the photo below and pulled their support.
The image by Archibald Prize winner Del Kathryn Barton is an image of her son not wearing a top.
Gasp!
This is in the same vein as the Subiaco Public Library refusing to exhibit the image below by Nicole Boenig-McGrade.
This time there’s two kids without tops on.
Double gasp!!
What’s particularly troubling in both these cases is that an official in officialdom has decided not that the images are offensive, but that some member of the public may find them offensive and the official has therefore decided to remove the offending image before anyone is, er, actually offended.
Make sense?
No, it doesn’t to me either. Welcome to the New Puritanism.
