Is Facebook too Conservative for Contemporary Art?
Bob Duggan on September 16, 2011, 11:08 PM
In the second article, Bomsdorf and Helen Stoilas discuss Facebook’s disabling of users’ accounts for posting historic paintings such as Gustave Courbet’s 1866 The Origin of the World because of nudity and/or strong sexual content. If the Fotografiska situation revisited censorship from a few decades ago, l’affair Courbet reaches back to the days of Queen Victoria (although Origin wasn’t exhibited publically until 1988). Uwe Max Jensen, a Danish artist known for courting controversy himself (such as repeatedly walking his dog on a museum’s lawn and leaving a series of mementos), posted nudes by long-dead Swedish artist Anders Zorn (such as the one above) only to have Facebook delete them. In that second article, a Facebook source claimed that naked photos of “actual” people are removed, but drawings, paintings, and sculptures of nudes aren’t.
Read full article here.
