2018 AA Club - Week 6

[scout]

Hope you had a flying start to the new school year!

Background: Manchester Art Gallery's decision to take down a famous painting from the Victorian age has generated widespread controversy around the world. The following is an excerpt of an opinion piece that was published in response to the issue.

Manchester Art Gallery says it has removed JW Waterhouse’s 1896 painting Hylas and the Nymphs from its displays “to prompt conversation”. Yet the conversation can only really be about one thing: should museums censor works of art on political grounds?

There can only be one answer if you believe in human progress.

To remove this work art from view is not an interesting critique but a crass gesture that will end up on the wrong side of history. This censorship belongs in the bin along with Section 28’s war on gay culture and the prosecution of Penguin Books for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960.

My, what a utopia these new puritans have in mind – a world that backtracks 60 years or more into an era of repression and hypocrisy. The great freedoms of modernity include, like it or not, freedom of sexual expression.

Hylas and the Nymphs is no masterpiece. Its mildly erotic vision of a Greek myth is very silly, if you ask me, and if we were in front of it now I’d be poking fun. Yet we’d be looking, talking, perhaps arguing. Remove it and the conversation is killed stone dead. Culture falls silent as the grave.

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Creativity has never been morally pure. Not so long ago, in the 90s, art was deliberately shocking and some were duly shocked to visit galleries and be shown Myra Hindley, unmade beds and toy Nazis. Now the tables have turned, and it’s cool to be appalled by – in this case – art made over a century ago. I can’t pretend to respect such authoritarianism. It is the just the spectre of an oppressive past wearing new clothes – and if we fall for the disguise we sign away every liberal value.