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Lots of blogs run with something spiritual on Sunday…

… Or maybe they feature a nature poem or something… Moving us up up and away, for a day, from the earthy immediacy of politics, corruption, conflict. But UD, at least this Sunday, seems to have started in on sex, so allow her to continue.

A public painting – it’s on a much-trafficked street corner in Taiwan – is generating some controversy and also some stupidity.

Here’s the painting.

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First, the stupidity.

In response to nearby residents complaining that they don’t want their kids having to walk by it all the time, the museum director explains that “nude does not necessarily represent sex.”

True. But sex represents sex.

In response to people taking offense at the political content of the painting – Taiwan’s getting fucked by China but cynically doesn’t mind – the artist (a professor at Taipei National University of the Arts) said that “the paintings [this one’s part of a series] were simply an expression of esthetics and that critics were overreacting.”

You don’t get to paint a political satire and then, when people get upset, say it’s a Jackson Pollock.

As to the controversy: Neighbors have a point about the public nature of an image this explicit. And in fact the painting will soon be moved to the museum’s interior courtyard.

On the business of the message upsetting people – well, yes, it would. But political art often wants to provoke in just these ways in order to prompt viewers to reexamine certain attitudes, etc. Nothing wrong with that. The artist, and the museum director, shouldn’t be coy and evasive. They’ve chosen to create and present provocative political art, and so be it.

Margaret Soltan, July 31, 2011 1:42PM
Posted in: it's art

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