Exposing Politicians

Speaking Truth to Power is always intoxicating and these days it’s a trend to show politicians without clothes and ridicule them through art. Over the summer Australian artist Lushsux was forced to ‘censor’ his mural of Hillary Clinton in a bikini by over-painting a burqa to avoid being penalized by the city council… https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/aug/02/hillary-clinton-mural-covered-with-niqab-after-public-decency-complaints. Then we had nude statues of both Donald Trump (titled ‘The Emperor has no balls’ LOL) http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/disturbing-statue-nude-donald-trump-pops-union-square-article-1.2756617 and Hillary Clinton appear in NYC’s Union Square… http://www.cbsnews.com/news/statue-of-naked-hillary-clinton-leads-to-tussle-in-nyc/. Both sculptures were promptly removed by the police,  and the Trump statue subsequently sold for $22K at auction. Today we have news that a nude painting of the Uruguay ex-president and his Senate wife titled ‘Uruguay’s Genesis’ by Julio de Sosa was forcibly removed from a PRIVATE gallery… https://www.artforum.com/news/id=64432. Seriously the censorship in our supposed ‘democracies’ is going too far and the politician’s sensibilities are getting too delicate. Soon we will become like Cuba or Turkey, where president Tayyip Erdogan continues to purge from active society anyone who even looks at him the wrong way, with the same intolerance that saw him try to sue a German public broadcaster over the airing of a satiric song then a German poet over a lewd poem. Obviously the powerful don’t like it when you are candid and creative in rendering raw their political ambitions. In more repressive society you can spend 10 months in jail for just painting your country’s leaders names on pigs, like artist El Sexto did in Cuba last year… http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/news/2015/10/21/cuba-releases-street-artist-el-sexto-after-10-months-in-prison-pig-paintings/ or even receive a DEATH SENTENCE (commuted to eight years and 800 lashes) like the Palestinian poet Ashraf Fayadh in Saudi Arabia… http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/world/middleeast/saudi-court-spares-poets-life-but-gives-him-8-years-and-800-lashes.html?_r=0 (see my post from 11/15). Hopefully artists will always continue to show courage and dissent by revealing the faults of the ruling class through freedom of expression and freedom of speech – and help exile all forms of unwarranted institutional censorship by pushing the boundaries of modern progressive society.