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by A new privately funded art show, organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, entitled A Knock On The Door... opened near Ground Zero on September the 11th to controversy. Some of the displays include: 'Patriot Act'- 42 mock postage stamps that depict President Bush with a pistol to his head (which the Secret Service has photographed), '(un)Patriotic(ic) Act'- a strait-jacket patterned with the American flag to demonstrate the shackling of our civil liberties, and 'Experiments in Resistance With Bleach' which portrays bacteria in a petri dish eating away at sections of the First Amendment.
Needless to say, families of 9/11 victims are offended by the nature of the exhibit. Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles, 51, was the airline pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon has said, These images will inflict needless pain to promote the careers of narcissists on a day when we should reflect on heartbreak and altruism. Defenders of the exhibit say, the show is a thoughtful, legitimate exploration of one way in which American artists' lives have changed because of 9/11; it raises questions about artistic freedom that ought to be asked near ground zero. And the anger directed against the show reveals some chilling cultural trends: the devaluing of art as a proper response to 9/11, and the persistent, wrong-headed idea that to question the government is to dishonor the memory of those who died.
Are these artists courageous defenders of our rights, braving government intimidation and veiled threats to decry the erosion our civil liberties, or are they self-important hacks, so insulated from reality they don't realize that their claims of censorship are self-refuting?
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0 Nerd-Its
You Keep A Knockin...
Cause you can't come in! Of course they are self-congratulatory idiots. They aren't in chains, are they? The very thing they are protesting - ain't happening. Seems to me they have all the artistic freedom in the world. (if you call that art) Try painting a picture of Castro with a gun to his head, if you call Havana home, and see how many days hence you would draw breath.
I find it especially irritating that the art show was organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. It is funded in part by taxpayers of New York, much to their chagrin, I am sure. I don't see how American artists lives per se have changed since 9/11, unless of course they lost someone in the terror attack, or if they witnessed the terror that day. We were all affected. Good God. It's not all about you. Grow up! If you are trying to recover from the terror attack , as the council states....try putting an arm around the family of the victims.
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0 Nerd-Its
Free for the Idiots
While I think some (all?) of this 'art' is extremely lame, I agree 100% with the defenders of the exhibit as quoted above. Questioning the government does not equate to dishonoring those who fight to defend the country it leads or those who have died when the country it leads was attacked. Will some take offense anyway? Yes. Should anything be done about it legally? No.
On the flip side of stuff like this art exhibit are the emails I sometimes get full of overly "patriotic" themes and stuff to try and make you cry. These things are equally annoying, if you ask me. The latest one claimed there were all sorts of evil things planned to go down in New Orleans the day Katrina struck, and you can imagine the implications. I wish I could go around and personally smack anyone who read that and forwarded it. Not because I know it to be false, but just because it's so completely stupid.
0 Nerd-Its
Can't please 'em all
I think this just goes to show that no matter what freedoms you provide people, someone's going to moan. Are there any other countries with as many freedoms as we have? At best I'd say we have a few equals, but nothing better. I just ignore stuff like this. It'll always be there. It'll always be small. And, it'll always have little to no impact on the world around it.
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Uselful Idiots by LordDilly :: NR8 :: Show
Are these artists courageous defenders of our rights, braving government intimidation and veiled threats to decry the erosion our civil liberties, or are they self-important hacks, so insulated from reality they don't realize that their claims of censorship are self-refuting?"
Well, my answer is a little more complicated than the question. First, I do hold the opinon that the "artists" are a bunch of self-important, reality-insulated hacks.
Self- important because they feel that you MUST listen to their VERY IMPORTANT message, RIGHT NOW, and they don't care if some 9/11 victims families are "greiving" or "memorializing" the dead, THIS IS IMPORTANT!!! Plus, on the exhibit's website, it mentions how some of the artists are being investigated by the Secret Service, to play up the "we're very very brave 'cause the gov'mint is mean" angle. Well, there are postage stamps that depict the POTUS with a gun to his head. The "artist" should be very well aware that the Secrtet Service will investigate any potential threats against the Presidents life. If he didn't know that, he is a giant, thumping idiot.
I'll get to the insulation from reality in a minute.
I don't have a very good technical knowledge of Art to give an in-depth, hard hitting analysis of why I think they are hacks, other than these few things: #1: If their work could stand up on it's own merits as fully realized "visual metaphors" (which is what a bunch of them are going for), why not let the work speak for itself at any other place in the country, on any other day of the year? No, they went for instant controversial shock value by choosing 9/11 near ground zero.
They are insulated from reality because they fail to comprehend that if you are loudly crying about govermint oppression of artists' civil liberties and you are, in fact, not being drug off to a gulag, or arrested, or fined, or disappeared, than your claims are rather self-refuting.
In spite of all of the above, I do feel that these idiots serve a useful purpose in our society, and are, in fact, "useful idiots." They are the Canary in a Coal Mine of our civil liberties. If at any given time you can find these yahoos decrying the loss of those civil liberties that allow them to decry the loss of same, you can be sure that our civil liberties are intact.