I wouldn’t believe it if it hadn’t happened.
A Fox affiliate, Fox 5 NY, when talking about a Picasso painting — “Women of Algiers (Version O),” which sold for a record $179 million this week — made a point of doing a little censoring of the classic work. Onscreen, a little blur appears over the top half of some women in the — yes — abstract painting.
Who knew that Picasso could still be so avant-garde?
This is what we needed to put the raunch and the excitement back into cubism. (Or is this the blue period? I am not as up on my Picasso as I ought to be. Though now that I know that he was painting dirty pictures, you can bet that I will start.)
To me, Picasso’s paintings form one of those brief intervals in art where nothing looks like what it is supposed to look like. The little descriptive caption next to what appears to be a series of disgruntled cardboard boxes trying to crush a 6-year-old’s drawing of a cat says that “This Is a Man With a Guitar.” You turn your head to the side and squint in the faint hope that it is a kind of magic-eye picture that will eventually resemble a man with a guitar. Yup, you say glumly. Art.
But now you are going to be staring at these pictures in earnest. You would not have noticed that that series of dots was a topless woman — until the astute eyes of the Fox affiliate pointed it out.
This station probably keeps Rorschach test ink blots off the air on the grounds that “these are incriminating pictures of my mother killing my father, nude and surrounded by sexy cigars.” Georgia O’Keeffe paintings are right out. Star maps? No way. Don’t want to catch sight of the sword of Orion.
What will they blur out next? The Washington Monument is an obvious no-go, but I think there’s a case to be made for the Capitol as well.
This is the degree of prudishness that made the Victorian era so much fun. When you feel the need to put a dainty little ruffle around a table leg lest someone feel lasciviously inclined toward it — well, put it this way: It’s not the table leg.
When most people see a Picasso, they sigh vaguely and think back to a course they took in college. When Fox 5 NY saw this, they were sexually terrified.
On the one hand, this is obviously silly. Yes, it’s a nude. But it’s also — art.
But maybe the station has a point.
For a long time, “But It’s Art” has been a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card when it came to displaying nudes prominently around your house. Why is it that if I crudely paint some genitalia on a wall, they remove me from the Starbucks bathroom, but if Michelangelo does it, people flock to see it from continents away? It seems wrong, somehow.
“I am a student of classical art” is another way of saying “I spend most of my days thinking about and staring at naughty pictures, and sometimes I travel miles and miles just to stare at one up close.”
Now the double standard no longer stands.
I can’t imagine what Fox would make of all the other old chestnuts. Vitruvian Man? The Thinker? Put some pants on!
“Ceci n’est pas un pipe”? Well, if it’s not a pipe, what is it? Better blur it, just to be sure.
Venus De Milo? Armless, maybe. Harmless, no. Mona Lisa needs a less revealing top.
Hieronymus Bosches are “Where’s Waldo’s” set in hell, where everyone is a naked demon-beast. Zoom in, and you’ve got a poster for “Silent Hill.” No part of this is acceptable. Blur it all!
What are they going to do about “Nude Descending a Staircase”? It may look like an explosion in a triangle factory, but we know it isn’t. Better blur the whole thing, just to be safe.
“Les Demoiselles D’Avignon” are out, too. Everyone in 1907 was right. I don’t know what those are, but I don’t like them one bit.
Once you start censoring, it’s impossible to stop. Can it be that all art is naughty? How did we miss this? We were putting Botticelli on our coasters and bags.
This is one of the things that any student of the classics learns early. As long as it’s old enough, you can read raunchy stories with impunity. People reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” get sneered at. But you can read “Lysistrata,” and no one bats an eye. Aristophanes is only high-brow because it’s so old. It’s full of fart jokes, double entendres and insults that would curl your great-aunt’s whiskers. Shakespeare, too. “Hamlet” is full of bawdy puns and country matters. Classic art is representative of the preoccupations of the species, and one of our chief preoccupations is — well, you know.
Art and censorship always dance a fascinating tango. We drag bored children to see Culturally Enriching matinees of things that caused riots on the nights they opened. Once you become A Masterpiece of Western Art, you lose your verboten edge. That’s not a naughty picture, thank you very much. That is a Picasso.
No, this Fox affiliate has got the right angle. Someone needs to put the taboo back in art.
Indecency, as they say, is in the groin of the beholder.
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