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 azazel the cat wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:There is a difference between being artistic and using art as a shield to hide your perverted actions behind.

And can you clarify for me what that difference is? Because "perverted actions" is a value judgement; thus reducing your statement to a matter of taste.

Exactly. Its slightly different for everyone. But that doesn't mean the difference is not important.

"I can't define obscenity but I know it when I see it" or something like it is the quote. Don't remember who said it though, a past Supreme Court Judge IIRC.

Grey Templar wrote:

 azazel the cat wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:There is a difference between being artistic and using art as a shield to hide your perverted actions behind.

And can you clarify for me what that difference is? Because "perverted actions" is a value judgement; thus reducing your statement to a matter of taste.

Exactly. Its slightly different for everyone. But that doesn't mean the difference is not important.

"I can't define obscenity but I know it when I see it" or something like it is the quote. Don't remember who said it though, a past Supreme Court Judge IIRC.

It was someone named Potter Stewart, and he would go on to lament having ever made such a weak and arbitrary statement. He would also be quoted as saying "Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself and is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime" during the Ginsburg trial.

One of the problems with the first quote is that it assumes there is a singular judge of art that represents all opinions, which on its face is ridiculous. In other words: who are you to be the definitive authority over what is art?

 Grey Templar wrote:


"I can't define obscenity but I know it when I see it" or something like it is the quote. Don't remember who said it though, a past Supreme Court Judge IIRC.

Really? That's a pretty sucky judge, considering it's pretty freaking easy to legally define obscenity.

miller v. california, 413 U.S. 15, 93 S. Ct. 2607, 37 L. Ed. 2d 419 (1973): wrote:(a) whether the "average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work depicting or describing sexual conduct when taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest…, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

None of these pictures have anything to do with sexuality, and therefore are not obscene.

I was only drawing a parallel between this and obscenity. Obscenity is a fairly subjective definition(contemporary community standards, that's pretty flexible) and so is art.

Anything can be art. Look at the gak (literally) that has been presented as art -- see Merda d'artista for an example.

The thing about the Vice cover is that positive mentions of suicide and descriptions of how to do it, by the media, have a high correlation with increased suicide rate in the days and months following.

Hence any artist who decides to depict suicide in his work needs to balance the importance of his message against the value of human live that may be lost as a result.