Thursday - October 01, 2009

Ok, I get it

But it’s still porn.

(Another follow up post; this one to Peiper’s post about the showing at the Tate gallery)

Tate Modern gallery has withdrawn a controversial photograph of Brooke Shields following a visit by police, amid concerns it could be in breach of child pornography laws.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police attended the gallery yesterday. They are consulting the Crown Prosecution Service over whether the image breaches the Obscene Publications Act.

The provocative picture by New York artist Richard Prince shows Shields standing naked in a bathtub, with a heavily made-up face and oiled torso. Children’s campaigners had condemned the Tate for including the picture in their latest exhibition, describing it as a “magnet” for paedophiles.

So controversial is the photograph, called Spiritual America, that it was hung in its own room behind a closed door bearing a warning that the work was “challenging”. However, visitors to a preview showing yesterday found the room closed.

The Tate chose to include the picture in the Pop Life: Art In A Material World after consulting lawyers. It has been exhibited in the US before but never in Britain. A spokesman said: “The exhibit is temporarily closed. We are in discussions with police.”

Prince’s work is a photograph of a photograph. The original was taken by Garry Gross, a US photographer, in 1975. It was commissioned by Shields’ mother, who was intent on turning her little girl into a child star and signed away the rights. The picture was later featured in a Playboy Press publication, and Gross planned to turn it into a poster.

In 1981, Shields made an unsuccessful attempt to buy back the negatives. A judge ruled that she was a “hapless victim of a contract… to which two grasping adults bound her”. The legal battle caught the eye of Prince, and he describes Spiritual America as a commentary on Shields as an “abstract entity”

When Gary Gross took the photograph, he called it “Brooke Shields : The woman in the child”. It is a photograph of an undeveloped little girl standing in a somewhat provocative pose, naked in a steamy fancy marble tub, while wearing a black lace choker, a ton of makeup, and a fancy hairstyle. At that age Brooke Shields had the facial structure of a woman in her mid 20s. That was her big appeal in the modeling world several years later. But it was this picture that her mother commissioned, signed away the rights to, and then published in a soft porn skin magazine to jump start the kid’s career. In my opinion the photograph is pornographic, though there are worse kinds of pornography.

Richard Prince comes along and takes a picture of the picture. Oooh, so creative. He might have saturated the colors a bit more, and he might have thrown in a little soft focus. But that’s it, and those are mights because I’ve never seen the originals, and how the heck can you really tell on the internet anyway? So Prince takes a picture of a picture, and gives it a smarmy douchebag title Spiritual America - ooh, what amazing irony, what soul splitting artistic insight: we crude Americans will whore out ourselves and our own children just to make a buck. Which pretty much was exactly what Brooke’s mother Terri Shields was doing.

Artistic merit: ZERO
Artistic effort: ZERO
Originality: ZERO

It isn’t “pop art”. At best Prince’s work is cynical snark. I get it already, now go away and take your kiddie smut with you.

But listen to the art world - this is the MAJOR PIECE at the Tate’s exhibition. The MOST IMPORTANT part. Which tells me that the Tate show sucks donkey hooves.

Tate Modern’s Pop Life is a fascinating show, but one of the most interesting works in it is the American artist Richard Prince’s 1983 work Spiritual America.

It takes the form of a ready-made or found object – a publicity photograph showing the prepubescent actress Brooke Shields naked, her body wet from the bath.

Prince framed the photo in an elaborate gilt frame, and then hung it alone. The heavily ironic title, Spiritual America, was used by Alfred Stieglitz for a photo taken in 1923 showing the haunches of a work horse. By using it Prince wasn’t inviting us to ogle the child, but to see exploitation as symptomatic of what was happening in America in the mink-coated Reagan years.

The image and title are used to contrast the country’s old values of hard work and honest endeavour with the pursuit of success and fame at whatever cost. When Prince first hung the picture on the gallery wall, it was without comment. It was as though he was speechless in the face of such crassness.

Nice try. FAIL. A picture of porn is still porn, no matter what “heavily ironic” title you steal from another work and label it with. Prince is a total loser. And the Tate Gallery are panderers.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6248384/Brooke-Shields-picture-withdrawn-from-Tate-exhibition-after-police-visit.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/richarddorment/6249734/Tate-Moderns-Brooke-Shields-photograph-a-crass-lack-of-morals-in-mink-coated-Reagan-years.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/6248757/Brooke-Shields-photographer-disappointed-by-police-pornography-claim.html

Posted by Drew458     on 10/01/2009 at 06:59 PM   
Filed Under: • Politically-Incorrect • Stoopid-People •  
• Comments (8) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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