art

“A Fire in my Belly” Censorship Protest, NYC

by Viviane on 12/17/2024

in censorship, Events

StopCensorship A Fire in my Belly Censorship Protest, NYCOrganized by Art Positive.

A version of “Fire in My Belly” may be viewed on Youtube (you must be signed in).

For more info about other protests, visit Hideseek.org (Chronicling responses to the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition and the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s film “A Fire in My Belly.”)

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Sexuality in Modernism: The (Partial) History (NYT)

by Viviane on 12/16/2024

in art, gay, queer

Holland Cotter:

WASHINGTON — With the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture,” one of our federally funded museums, the National Portrait Gallery, here in the city of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” has gone where our big private museums apparently dare not tread, deep into the history of art by and about gay artists.

Over the last few years there has been plenty of speculation as to how this show would shape up, and when a copy of the catalog arrived, I felt a bit let down. All the artists were well known — stars — as was most of the work. The whole enterprise looked like an exercise in Hall of Fame-building, rather than like an effort to chip away at the very idea of hierarchy and exclusion. We were getting a “pride” display, an old model, very multicultural 1980s.

Then, when the Catholic League and several members of Congress demanded the removal of a piece — a video by David Wojnarowicz (pronounced voy-nah-ROH-vitch) that included an image of ants crawling on a crucifix — and the gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian, said O.K., we really were in the 1980s, back in the culture wars. Which led me to understand the show in a somewhat different way.

On reconsideration, it seems more purposeful, as if specifically designed to avoid any controversy that might distract from the major point it was trying to make: namely, that work of gay artists was fundamental to the invention of American modernism. Or, put another way, difference had created the mainstream.

But how was the presence of difference defined in art? By subject matter? By style? By the sexual orientation of the artist? And isn’t gayness, the most familiar form of such difference, a period concept, inapplicable to life and art of a century ago? Today the very word is used for convenience rather than categorically, with “queer” often used. (One way to think of it: gay is something you are; queer is something you choose to be outside of the heterosexual norm.)

Clearly the exhibition covers a lot of ground and raises many questions. It also has wonderful art, and the art stays wonderful whether you ask the questions or not. Again this seems part of the plan devised by the curators, David. C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery, and Jonathan D. Katz, director of the doctoral program in visual studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. They have assembled a historical show with a very specific slant, but with rewards for everyone.

Link

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 11/15/2024

in del.icio.us, sex

  • Crimes of the Art? | Culture | Vanity Fair – Eight years after Larry Rivers’s death, both his pioneering art and his hypersexual private life are getting fresh attention. In the 70s, he filmed his adolescent daughters topless for a documentary, Growing, that the younger one, Emma Rivers Tamburlini, says is nothing less than child pornography. With battle lines drawn between Emma and those who guard Rivers’s legacy, the author asks whether the artist was shattering taboos or destroying innocence.
  • Women Who Like to Be Dominated in Bed: Talking to BDSM Submissives | AlterNet – Outside of the BDSM scene, there are many misconceptions about submissive women. Non-kinky individuals might assume that submissive women are passive, indecisive or weak individuals who lack ambition—in other words, the anti-feminists. But spend some time around the BDSM community, and one encounters plenty of submissive women who describe themselves as card-carrying feminists. A female submissive might be a corporate lawyer or an emergency room physician, or she might be signing a major book deal. The fact that she is voluntarily submissive in the dungeon doesn’t mean that she is submissive outside of the dungeon.
  • Out Of The Closet … In The Pulpit Of A Megachurch : NPR – "There are two things in my life that are an absolute," the megachurch pastor told his flock. "I did not ask for either one of them, both of them were imposed upon me, I had no control over either of them. One was the call of God on my life… and the other thing … was my sexual orientation."
  • NYC swingers sex parties are feeling the pinch of the tough economy |NY Daily News – DDeviousDelights is one of many venues that blame the economy for its 30 to 40% event attendance drop this year. The high-end roaming party One Leg Up said it has had about 20 percent fewer event attendees a year since 2007. And one stationary club — the 14-year-old Carousel Couples Club — reported a 60% attendance plunge from 2007 to 2009.
  • Young Women Chat About Porn, Sex Work, Blogging and the ‘F-Word’ With Beauty Myth Author Naomi Wolf – Speakeasy – WSJ – The panelists were Feministing.com blogger and author Courtney Martin, sex blogger and queer advocate Lena Chen, sex education activist Shelby Knox, and libertarian “free-market feminist” Allison Kasic.
  • For Gays, New Songs of Survival- NYTimes.com – In the wake of the continued legal wrangling over the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and same-sex marriage; harassment of gay youth in schools; and anger over the use of a gay joke in the trailer for the Vince Vaughn film “The Dilemma,” the top of the pop music charts has become a refuge of unambiguous support for gay rights.

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 10/18/2024

in del.icio.us, sex

  • Follow That Story: Lara Jade Won Her Lawsuit | violet blue ® :: open source sex – Way back in May 2007, young female photographer (and aspiring fashion photog) Lara Jade Coton put a plea for help up on Flickr. One of her photos (that she had shared on DeviantART) was being used as an American porn boxcover — reprehensibly, it was not only used without permission but it was also a self-portrait she’d taken on a family vacation when she was only 14.
  • Sexual ‘thesis’ deserves zero out of 10 | Zoe Margolis – Perhaps her lack of self-awareness and her inability to provide a social critique are what has led to so much criticism, and the fact that she named people publicly is an obvious violation of others’ privacy, which clearly highlights her naivety. What worries me, though, is the widespread “slut-shaming” the author is now receiving from the media: her sex life is being routinely condemned. Were a man to have written this, he’d be getting slaps on the back (or have a movie made based on his life) for being a “stud”. Women who talk about sex instead attract newspaper headlines chastising them for their actions and have moral judgments cast on their behaviour which men do not have to endure.
  • Yale Fraternity’s Chant Reveals Depth of Our Culture’s Misogyny | Will Neville | RHRealityCheck.org – The problem isn’t that a group of young men at yelled something stupid, over and over agian. The problem is that I’m no longer sure we’re shocked by people who turn rape and sexual assault into some kind of a joke. It’s embarassing for those involved, sure. But the sentiment they expressed is shockingly — and terrifyingly — mainstream.
  • Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” Series: A Critical Compendium | ARTINFO.com – Works from Jeff Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series — paintings and sculptures that depict the artist with his then-lover, Italian porn star Cicciolina, in a variety of romantic situations — have returned to New York, where many were first displayed in 1991 at the Sonnabend Gallery in SoHo. (Some pieces — of the slightly less hardcore variety — were shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale.) New York critics, with perhaps only one exception, have lambasted the current “Made in Heaven” show at the Upper East Side townhouse of Luxembourg & Dayan, following in a rich lineage of writers that have panned work. Over the past two decades, the series has earned near-universal scorn from most art critics and inspired some of the all-time-great takedowns in recent criticism.
  • My Mother And Her Vibrator | Pamela Madsen | Psychology Today – It lived in her closet for years. – until my mother turned 81. Every-time I brought it up. – mom would tell me that she was frightened of hurting herself. I would talk to her about this. “Come on mom – how are you going to hurt yourself?”.. She could never explain to me her fears, and in the end the vibrator remained unused…And then one afternoon my mother called me. I knew something was up at “Hello”. She had this cat who had caught the canary kind of voice….”Well, I used it!” She gushed.

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Bookmarks

by Viviane on 07/22/2024

in del.icio.us, sex

  • N.Y.U. Doesn’t Want Film of Larry Rivers’s Naked Daughters – NYTimes.com – After it came to light last week that films and videotapes made by the artist Larry Rivers included footage of his two daughters naked, New York University informed his foundation that it did not want those materials included as part of the archive it was purchasing, said John Beckman, a spokesman for N.Y.U.<br />
    <br />
    That leaves the question of what to do with the films and tapes, which are now in the hands of the Larry Rivers Foundation and which Mr. Rivers’s younger daughter, Emma Tamburlini, wants turned over to her and her sister, Gwynne Rivers. Mr. Rivers died in 2002.
  • Buttman v. The Man: D.C.’s First Big Obscenity Trial in Decades Fails to Determine the Obscenity of Milk Enemas – The Sexist – Washington City Paper – But after the trial, jurors were more concerned with what wasn’t in Milk Nymphos: Violence. Rape. Bestiality. Kids. “These people were adults and they were willing. No one put a gun to their head,” Crawford said. “Had they brought a child out in pampers, then we would have been like, hell no,” Mordecai added. In opening arguments, the defense emphasized that the only entity forcing anyone to watch porn is the government. “The movies are not—and are not meant to be—distributed to these 14 strangers sitting in a federal courthouse,” defense attorney Paul Cambria said. The films feature “adults putting on a performance…for another adult, who would make that choice [to watch it] if that were his or her cup of tea.”
  • Stagliano Case: A Pyrrhic Victory? « Blogging Censorship – Not prepared to alienate anybody, Holder told a panel of congressmen that he will pursue, with limited resources, obscenity cases that have the “greatest potential for harm” while being aware of First Amendment considerations.
  • District To Pay Lesbian Teen $35K Over Prom Dispute : NPR – A school district in rural Mississippi that canceled its prom rather than allow a lesbian student to attend with her girlfriend has agreed to pay $35,000 to settle a discrimination lawsuit the ACLU filed on her behalf.

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