There are some interesting debates to be had about the Tate's decision to withdraw the paintings of artist Graham Ovenden from their online collection, following his conviction for child sex offences.
For a start, why should his private life make a difference? After all, Eric Gill's carvings can still be seen on public display - outside Broadcasting House, for instance - despite the revelation after his death that he sexually abused his young daughters, not to mention the family dog. But then Gill's works don't generally feature pre-pubescent girls in provocative poses, or indeed dogs in provocative poses, whereas Ovenden's paintings seem to be about little else (the girls, that is, not the dogs).
Then again, isn't art meant to be subversive, transgressive? What could be more subversive than challenging the hegemonic discourse surrounding paedophilia?
Raymond Tallis in the Times today (£) unravels the contradictions:
After Ovenden was found guilty of the sexual molestation of children, the Tate withdrew his works from their online collection and they will not be available for viewing by appointment. Ovenden’s conviction has, we are told, “shone a new light” on his work. It may seem odd that the gaze of the curator had to be supplemented by the spectacles of a judge to reveal that Ovenden’s canvasses betrayed that he was “sexually besotted with young girls”. The episode does indeed shine “a new light” — on the rhetoric that surrounds much contemporary art.
How many times have we been told that art is — or must be — “subversive”, “transgressive” and “dangerous”? In some cases these terms are mobilised as a defence of stuff that is manifestly no good: it really is good, after all, because it subverts our expectation of what art is or should be. More often, we are told that it is the duty of the artist to shock. Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, defended Damien Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided — consisting of two brutally severed carcasses — on these grounds. “For me,” he said, “the undoubted shock, even disgust provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be transgressive.” “Life,” he added, “is not all sweet.” Who knew? Not the visitors to the gallery, apparently, who required instruction in the tough truths of the real world.
There seems to be a kind of inverted hypocrisy at work. We have comfortable, establishment figures — curators, critics, pillars of the art world — cheer-leading for art that pretends to devalue conventional values. Now we discover that perhaps these are values that, after all, they secretly share. Or was sequestering Ovenden’s works more a precautionary step than the result of moral revulsion?...
It is absurd to judge works of art by the morality of the artist. We don’t have to forgive Caravaggio’s murder of a rival before we can permit ourselves to be ravished by his work. But when the art is an expression of something truly evil in the artist, and invites collusion in that evil, then we have to ask whether we wish to value it. The founding thought of contemporary art criticism, from Wilde’s Dorian Grey, was a corrective to the shallow, sentimental moralising of the time: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” That is, of course, not all.
The case of Ovenden should give pause to the prattlers of the art world. Perhaps there may be a reality behind the rhetoric, and some “transgressive”, “subversive” art really is as objectionable as it pretends to be. And perhaps some curators and critics should grow up and recognise that a man who paints naked, suggestive portraits of young children might actually be a paedophile.
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