Ruth D. Post 7

Ruth Ellen Day

I believe that art influences the behavior of the innocent and weak minded. Whether it is in the form of art, music, literature, or film, it will influence those who do not already have a strong moral compass. I find the Mapplethorpe photos disturbing and they are certainly something I don’t think kids should be exposed to. However, I don’t think they should be banned from the view of the entire American public. I think that Mapplethorpe had every right to create them, anyone who wants to see them has every right to see them, and any museum that wishes to display them has every right to display them. The only responsibility that the museum has is to warn potential viewers of the photographs’ content and not allow children to view them without parental supervision. We do this with sexually explicit movies it only makes sense to do it with sexually explicit photographs as well. It seems as though the museums did do this, “Realizing that the sadomasochistic works were potentially problematic, curators in all the venues took special care with their placement, warning that these works might be appropriate for children, segregating the X, Y, and Z Portfolios in a special room, or placing them separately in closed cases,” (Steiner, 19). To me, this separation of the sexually explicit works from the clean ones and labeling them with a warning should have been enough to quell any controversies over the matter. Anyone who viewed them should have been prepared for what they were about to see. It seems as though the senators that we saw in the videos that were vehemently denouncing the Mapplethorpe photos as garbage made by a sleaze ball were threatened by the photographs. Maybe that awakened a new side of themselves that they didn’t know was there and so the photographs were influencing their thoughts. Maybe their moral compasses were not strong enough to withstand photographs of sadomasochistic acts. This probably scared and threatened them and led them to assume that if people as “righteous” as they were could be led to think immoral thoughts by these photographs, then everyone else in the nation would react the same way and the country would fall into chaos. It is my belief that anyone with a strong moral compass would not be threatened by these images. They might find them disgusting or disturbing but that is a matter of personal preference.

I do believe that creating something visual equals advocacy. This is because if an artist creates something it usually means something to them. Mapplethorpe obviously was not against homosexuality or sadomasochism. If he was, he wouldn’t have represented such ideas so explicitly in his work. I think that the textual meaning works the same way. Why right something down and take the trouble to get it published if you don’t agree with it? Also, both mediums should act similarly on the spectator. However, the visual medium generally has a wider effect. More people can relate to the visual. You don’t have to have a very active imagination to get something out of it. For this reason, however, it is easier to misunderstand the visual. The artist does not always make the meaning explicit. This is different than the textual because writers usually make sure a lot of their message is explicit but with some implicit details. Unlike many examples of textual art, visual art is not meant to be taken literally. This is the reason for much of the controversy surrounding visual art today, “At the moment, the vacuum in aesthetic theory in America has propelled art into the realm of politics, where the virtuality of art, its symbolic reality, its subtle contradictoriness are simplified into a literalism that confounds practitioners, experts, and laypeople alike,” (Steiner, 10). In my opinion, the blending of the art and political realm should be done only by the artist. A politician should not force a piece of art into the political realm if it is not meant to be there.

Concerning the photographs of nude children by both Sally Mann and Mapplethorpe, would they have been as controversial if they had been paintings? I have seen numerous paintings of nude children and never thought twice about them. It seems to me that these photographs of children by Mann and Mapplethorpe have the same feel as a painting. They document the innocence of youth. Children are unashamed to be naked; that sort of think is taught, not born into us. Such innocence is beautiful. Those who see the images created my Mann and Mapplethorpe as child pornography and the people with sick minds, not the artists. This sort of sentiment applies to many of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. A lot of his work brings what used to be in the painted realm into the realm of photographic art, “as Janet Kardon has written, ‘Mapplethorpe dissolved the boundaries between photographs, painting, and sculptures. He made photographs not just a means of conveying visual information but allowed it to achieve a monumentality we associate with paintings,’” (Steiner, 51).

In conclusion, I agree with Jessica when she said that is impossible for one to separate their moral values from themselves when they are viewing a piece of art. This is why I find Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic images so disturbing. However, not everyone has the same moral values and I do not think that anyone has the right to impose their’s onto anybody else. This is what I think the politicians and the ministers were trying to do when the denounced Mapplethorpe’s work and called for it not to be displayed in museums,