Lecture 9// Censorship and truth..

Overview//

- Notions of censorship and truth.
- The indexical qualities of photography in rendering truth.
- Photographic manipulation and the documentation of truth.
- Censorship in advertising.
- Censorship in art and photography.

Censorship//

- The practice or policy of censoring films, letters or publications.

Censor//

1. A person authorised to examine films, letters or publications, in order to ban or cut anything considered obscene or objectionable.

2. To ban or cut portions of (a film, letter or publication)

Morals//

- Principles of behaviour in accordance with standards of right and wrong.

Ethics//

1. A code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual.

2. The moral fitness of a decision, course of action etc.

3. The study of the moral value of human conduct.


'Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich and reconstruct the world around him- to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation.'

Theodore Levitt, The Morality of Advertising, 1970

Amy Adler- The Folly of Defining 'Serious' Art//

- Professor of Law at New York University 'an irreconcilable conflict between legal rules and artistic practice.'

- The requirement that protected artworks have 'serious artistic value' is the very thing contemporary and postmodernism itself attempt to defy.

The Miller Test, 1973//

- Asks three questions to determine whether a work should be labelled 'obscene' and hence denied constitutional protection.

- Whether 'the average person, appyling contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.

- Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct.

- Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.

Obscenity Law//

- 'To protect art whilst prohibiting trash.'

- 'The dividing line between speech and non-speech.'

- 'The dividing line between prison and freedom.'

Protection of Children Act//

- Deems the making, possession, distribution and display of indecent pictures of children an offence.

- Up to ten years in prison.


Final Thoughts//

- Just how much should be believe the 'truth' represented in the media?

- And shouldwe be protected from it?

- Is the manipulation of the truth fair game in a Capitalist, consumer society?

- Should art sit outside of censorship laws exercised in other disciplines?

- Who should be protected, artist, viewer or subject?