![]() The popular artworld answer that the photographs that Henson makes (and by extension, the means he employs to make them) are protected by artistic licence will only be good enough if we have a really persuasive story about why we should allow works of art to be offensive in ways that would ordinarily be intolerable. We need to know whether he has an artistic licence, and (if he does) why it should not be withdrawn on roughly the same grounds as those that would prevent the issue of a similar licence to any optimistic old delinquent with a 10 megapixel Olympus and a zoom lens. You may well ask: 'So what has all this to do with Bill Henson looking around school playgrounds for suitable models for his photographs'? It suggests that things may deserve to be admired - or at least to be tolerated - for a range of reasons, especially including contextual reasons, unrelated to artistic merit. Their tacit abandonment of artistic merit is a step in the right direction. They are likely to change the game by ruminating on 'art history' and 'turning points' and 'cultural significance'. 1512-1514) than with offerings of human ordure. Artistic merit is more easily associated in most minds with Raphael's Sistine Madonna (c. The experts called in to testify about this are likely to hesitate. That is, if you are open to persuasion that each and every certified 30 gram can full is artistically meritorious. The weak thesis (that it is disgusting but it doesn't matter all that much because it is artistically meritorious) is much stronger. It must be artistically meritorious if having artistic merit is a necessary condition for it to count as a work of art, which it most certainly does. It is also (so they say) artistically meritorious. Piero Manzoni's can of personal ordure (1961) is disgusting. Logic being the way it is, the strong thesis is the weak one, and vice-versa. ![]() But it relies mainly on the strong thesis that if the thing has artistic merit then it can't possibly be disgusting or vilifying or inflammatory. It offers a weak thesis that if the thing has artistic merit, then it should be forgiven for being disgusting or vilifying or inflammatory. The theory behind all this is so obviously dud that one wonders how it creaks along. The important players from the relevant branch of the entertainment industry who are providing expert testimony are not listening. It's useless for the jury to ask 'Why not?' Or it would be useless, if the jury were allowed to ask questions. ![]() 'Why,' they may well ask, 'can't this thing have artistic merit and be disgusting or vilifying, or inflammatory? Why can't we just order it to be destroyed, and then send its author to prison as we normally would? To which the baffling answer will be 'Because if it has artistic merit, then it is not disgusting or vilifying or inflammatory'. The members of the jury will of course be mystified. To get away with such offences requires artistic licence and an ability to summon major players from a branch of the entertainment industry into court to assure the jury that, despite the evidence before their very eyes, the object in the dock is not disgusting or vilifying or inflammatory because it has artistic merit. This intrinsic quality (so they say) is why they can sometimes get away with being quite offensive despite being morally disgusting or racially vilifying or politically inflammatory. They are objects with a very peculiar intrinsic goodness of such purity and potency that they are priceless, as well as quite expensive. The current theory - if that's not too grand a name for it - is that works of art are not like other things. ![]() With artistic licence you can be quite offensive and get away with it without artistic licence you need to be a lot more careful.Īrtistic licences are distantly related to the so-called 'artistic merit' defence, on which you may need to rely should you be prosecuted for offences such as publicly cultivating a garden bed in the shape of a hammer and sickle, like Morgan (in the film of the same name). It's more like having a drivers licence, with which you can endanger the public, open a bank account and identify yourself conveniently. Artistic licence should not to be confused with the more licentious artistic license (spelled with an 's'), that legitimises mis-statements of fact.
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