arse gratia artis

A woman wrote to a newspaper recently and argued, quite reasonably I thought, that if she takes her children to see a movie rated “cool for kids”, they should not have to sit through trailers for movies rated “only for adults who don’t know something sick when they see it”.

Just one of the 400 sound reasons I avoid watching TV in real time is that there is no avoiding having vile images hurled at me during ad breaks. I figure if I want to watch ugly shit there are more than enough opportunities for me to select it deliberately.

I do not advocate absolute censorship – far from it – but the freedom to choose some-thing implies its corollary; the freedom to choose no-thing.

There are many reasons for me to spend the rest of my life despising things done by the Kennett government, yet I once received a fine in the mail for failing to vote at a state election. I hadn’t realised there was an election on because I was going through one of those recurring phases when reality is unbearable. For a while I chose to avoid news broadcasts, papers and other public information and so missed the vote.

Several good bits of advice came my way. “Tell ‘em yer a Jehovah’s witness cos they don’t have to vote”. “Tell ‘em you voted and someone at the booth must have stuffed up.”

Instead, the excuse I gave the electoral commission was the truth. My reply said something like “I am not coping, so I've been living with a media blackout. If I’d known there was an election I would have voted, because I hate Jeff Kennett’s guts.”

Well, I never heard any more about it, but I digress.

We might be a minority, but some of us people out here occasionally become disturbed and, when disturbed, find disturbing images disturbing. Sometimes, we are fine but disturbing images still disturb us.

A fair dinkum judge’s words have become a cliché - while we struggle to define “porn”, we know what it is when we see it. The same pretty much applies to art. I might struggle to define art, but I know what it is not - it is not used on the covers of vampire books, nor are images from the darker genres of movies what I would personally call art.

Anyway, an original might or might not be art but a copy is, by definition, just a copy.

  

And so to an article in The Age about MCC plans to spend $60,000 on CCTV to protect street art in Hosier Lane.

Some artists are distressed by the idea, as the cameras would put artists off working there. ''It's a violation of privacy with artists that value their privacy immensely.”

It certainly is a violation of something. The "art", I mean.
I wish they cared enough about their privacy to keep their art private. If they want to force it on the public, then the public is entitled to invade their privacy. Or something like that.

I’m torn. I don’t know whether I like the idea of putting artists off by installing a camera, or giving other morons the freedom to paint meaningless but less disturbing rubbish over some of this "art" by not installing a camera at all.

Whatever.

I shouldn’t have to see this sort of shit without first having a chance to say “no thanks”.

If the MCC goes to all the trouble of making buskers audition before they can get a licence, they could also use a little quality control with the way buildings are being defaced - because defacement is what it is.