Posted on 05/07/2016 3:26:27 PM PDT by Kaslin
PBS correspondent Jeffrey Brown explained “Mapplethorpe was best known for his homoerotic photographs and explicit sadomasochistic imagery, and the political and legal battles around them. Even now, we’ve chosen not to present his most controversial work.”
But PBS didn’t just censor the art. They couldn’t even bring themselves to describe it. We’re not told about Mapplethorpe’s naked self-portrait with a bullwhip us his anus. We’re not told about his pornification of a little boy and a little girl. We’re not told about “Jim and Tom, Sausalito” – a photo in which one man urinates into another’s mouth.
So when the liberal curators say that Mapplethorpe’s art wasn’t properly appreciated because we were “preoccupied” with it as evidence in an obscenity trial, they’re making a (disguised) case for obscenity.
BRITT SALVESEN: For several years after the culture wars debate of the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was impossible to see the work as art because we were preoccupied with its status as evidence, let’s say.
JEFFREY BROWN: As part of that culture war.
SALVESEN: Yes. And that really forestalled an assessment of his artwork.
BROWN: Mapplethorpe grew up in a conservative Irish Catholic household in Queens, New York, and in the 1970s became part of the city’s burgeoning gay scene. He focused from the beginning on three main subjects: portraiture, including artists and celebrities of the day, floral still lifes, and sex and the body.
That’s as close as PBS gets to describing the outrageous sex shots – they explore “sex and the body.” So when the late Sen. Jesse Helms is brought in as the only contrary soundbite, he’s dramatically out of context. For all the PBS viewer knows, he just didn’t like tasteful nudes, like he’d disapprove of Michelangelo:
BROWN: He would achieve fame, but for the public at large that came in 1989 when North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms took to the Senate floor to decry federal funding for a traveling exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s work.
SEN. JESSE HELMS: I don’t even acknowledge that it’s art. I don’t even acknowledge that the fellow who did it was an artist. I think he was a jerk.
BROWN: Bowing to political pressure, Washington’s Corcoran Museum cancelled the show, and when it went on to the Cincinnati Arts Center, its director was arrested and charged with obscenity. He was later acquitted.
But Mapplethorpe’s work would for years after be seen in this context. The Los Angeles exhibitions contain the controversial work, accompanied by warning signs of their explicit content. Mapplethorpe himself, this is his last self-portrait, died of AIDS, at age 42, just before the cultural tempest burst.
Late in the piece, Brown ushered in the HBO filmmakers/propagandizers, where again there is a reference to Mapplethorpe’s shock tactics, with no examples:
FENTON BAILEY: I think he was playing something of a game of cat and mouse with his audience and critics. I think he knew that it would provoke, but he also said he never was intending to shock people.
BROWN: I mean, do you take that at face value? How could it not shock people?
BAILEY: I do and I don’t. You know, exactly. I mean, he knew that the key here was to photograph things, to document things that people considered outside of the realm of art. The way he did it was to elevate them and make them beautiful. The composition and the lighting was incredible. And so, he made what other people just dismissed as pornography, he made it art, and made us look at it seriously.
But photographs (or paintings, or sculptures) are judged not just on their composition, but on their subject matter. If Mapplethorpe had taken a gloriously well-lit black-and-white photograph of a baby aborted at eight months, that would be seen as obscene by his leftist mythologizers.
Brown and PBS find it unnecessary to discuss the objection that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize art that is obscene...since PBS wouldn't want to discuss how taxpayers shouldn't be forced to subsidize TV news shows with a very one-sided tilt to the left. In this case, it was doubly offensive to the conservative, like a sanitized version of the 1991 outrage Tongues Untied.
I didn’t see anything here regarding his connections with Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz.
At the time, there was a back story that Robert Mapplethorpe was working in conjunction with Berkowitz in some type of death cult/murder voyeur thing. Berkowitz even admitted it and provided details while in prison.
He later recanted and went back to the Son of Sam story line. But much of his Mapplethorpe testimony was supposedly verifiable.
Now, that haircut is *really* an obscenity.
Absolutely! This is one thread that’s best left as text only.
There was a movie/documentary on Showtime or HBO about the pictures of Maplethorpe.....
NO, I didn’t watch it all. There is no need to do so, I took the punishment for you.
And he was talented. The guy could and did do more with a cheap Polaroid than most photographers do with hundred-thousand-dollar studios. The guy had the eye.
As far as not intending to shock, however, I don't think anyone can look at his work and say that with a straight face, not unless you regard a pose with a Thompson submachine gun in front of a large, wall-mounted pentagram to be soothing. Of course he meant to shock, with the same over-the-top immaturity that eventually killed him. If PBS can't bring themselves to admit that they're simply lying.
Hmm. AIDS can addle the brain. I wonder if that is the real cause of that "art."
No wonder mapplethorp was loved so much by the left.
A good bit of Mapplethorpe is ok work BUT he was so dreary faggy
I prefer Helmut Newton erotica
RIP
Is geron l zotted
It would have been all over this
And it damn near killed him.
My husband had legs like that, from bicycling.
I went to Cincinnati at the time, where they were displaying Mapplethorpe’s porn.
Do tell.
It’s just an old joke.
Sigh... You just don't get it. What was the relationship of the penis to the calla lily? And it wasn't just some flower in a butt crack, it was a specific, symboloic flower in a butt crack, representing the gradually separation of humanity from the natural world, vis-à-vis the relentless growth of the middle class.
Sheesh!
Wow. Very weird. I know that many people who studied the case believe that Son of Sam did not act alone.
Thank you for reminding me that when he was young and just starting out Arnold Schwarzenegger turned tricks with wealthy homos.
That is, he was a homosexual prostitute.
Homos and there defenders scream bloody murder at even the merest hint of the realities of their activities. High rates of drug and alcohol abuse, as well as the desire for anonymity among those who take part, make clear even the most numbed conscience is disgusted by them.
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