by Jon Lackman | 19 April 2007 | Crime
In an editorial in the latest Revue de l’art (n. 155), the editors write that “The recent indictment of Henry-Claude Cousseau, currently director of the Ecole nationale supérieure des Beaux-arts, for an exhibition that he organized in 2000, as director of the CAPC-Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, again raises the question of censorship in art. Let’s quickly summarize the facts. It all began with an exhibition presented at CAPC, Presumed Innocent: Contemporary Art and Childhood, which from the start provoked polemic — the mayor refused to attend the opening and forbade his assistants to do so as well. A father, shocked by certain works, filed a suit, later withdrawn. A children’s-rights organization, ‘La Mouette,’ based in Agen, picked up the baton. Now, six years later, this suit has resulted in the indictment of Henry-Claude Cousseau as well as two directors of the exhibition, art critic Stéphanie Moisdon-Tremblay and Marie-Laure Bernandac, now a Louvre Museum conservator. Twenty-five of the eighty artists exhibited, including French artists such as Christian Boltanski and Annette Messager, as well as foreign artists such as Cindy Sherman and Nan Goldin, are also being targeted by this judicial action, which is alleges two infractions: distributing a pornographic image of a minor, and distributing a violent message that is either pornographic or obscene where it can be seen by a minor.”
The Revue de l’art concludes: “Violence (and not just sexual violence) is everywhere today. We can lament this, but we must also keep it in mind during any evaluation we make of this or that art activity, of which the real impact appears finally to be rather limited, even if the outcry is great … Wouldn’t it be better, instead of censoring and condemning, to educate children … to decipher images, all images? We teach them to read and to write … but what about images, in which today’s world is immersed?”
