This Victorian fantasy above is too racy for 2018.
John William Waterhouse's 1896 painting of Hylas and the Nymphs, of a young man being lured to his doom by spectral young swimmers, has been removed "temporarily" from the Manchester Galery to create "a conversation."
Clare Gannaway, the gallery’s curator of contemporary art, said the aim of the removal was to provoke debate, not to censor... “It wasn’t about denying the existence of particular artworks.”said the debates around Time’sUp and #MeToo had fed into the decision...The removal itself is an artistic act.The Victorians were less prudish than today's gallery directors.
[Hat tip Christina Sommers & Jack Grieveson; Image: Wikipedia Commons]
4 comments:
And I can't think of anything more cowardly than their supposed reasoning.
The did it for Art. Riiight.
That is a disaster for art.
There's that word "conversation" again. The coward's way of saying shut-up.
And we aren't denying the existence of the painting. We just hope after a while you will forget it existed and quit asking about it so we can stop not denying it never existed.
Yours,
People's Commissariat for Education
"The removal itself is an artistic act."
This may be the most offensive thing about this whole piece: The idea that removing artwork from public view is an act on par with creating artwork in the first place. This is the mentality of thug painting graffiti on a building or statue, or of a vandal defacing a monument. And they expect us to believe it!
Art is in dire need of a revolution. At this point, it's obvious that the art "community" has nothing left to provide to us; it is only outsiders that are still making anything worth seeing, watching, or listening to.
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