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.
Everybody knows this is nowhere 
“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.”
How come no one asks me how offended I get everytime I see Tony Abbott’s head, or accidently twiddle my radio dial onto 2GB, or suffer people calling the Wests Tigers – Balmain.
If you wanted to seriously run the line that things should be banned/pulled because it may offend then yes, everything needs be banned.
Pull on the blindfold, slip in the ear plugs, clip the peg onto your nose and let’s all enjoy “PROGRESS”
Andrew Stark
January 28, 2011 at 7:17 am
Or how come no-one minds that I find this sort of bullshit, knee jerk, reactionary, censorship offensive?
Ah it’s a complex world we find ourselves in….
PJH
January 28, 2011 at 4:49 pm
The world is run by and polluted with idiots.
This fact is consistently confirmed, this article point in case.
daybookexchange
February 16, 2011 at 1:21 pm