Thursday, August 31, 2006

Art Attack

The Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery has pulled a documentary from its show Arts and Islam after recieving a complaint from the Muslim art group Artists Circle. The complaint came because the film, by Bangladeshi-British photographer Syra Miah, contains an image of a half-naked mentally ill woman. According to the Artists Circle, partial nudity is offensive to Islam, etc. etc. etc. This is getting to be depressingly commonplace, isn't it? And after the museums standing up for free speech against the Jessie Helms Brigade in the 1980s and 1980s! Now, private phone calls are made, the public isn't consulted, and art works simply disappear. Well, I'll say the same thing now that I did then: Artists are people who mine through their soul and subconscious and bring the treasures that they find into the sunlight to present to the rest of us. If any of those tunnels are ever considered too dangerous to mine, and blocked off, you run the risk of suffocating them completely.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Correction: it wasnt a documentary film, rather a series of photographs.

The Artists Circle seem to have issued a statement regarding this: http://artistscircle.org.uk/statement.htm

Rufus said...

Very interesting. Thanks!