h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Yeah, but that's only when they don't want to admit that they've go no idea what it is (and in recent years Time Team has blown the lid right off that little get-out clause).

"Similarly...we're taught that there's a difference between artistic nudes and pornographic nudes...that the artist is simply 'showing an appreciation of the human form.' Pull the other one! After all...it's more or less traditional for artists to sleep with their models, isn't it?"

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I was in Stockport Central Library the other day... out of interest I took a look at the art shelves. A book on abstract sculpture - booked out twice in six months. A book on Cubism - out three times in six months. "Teach Yourself Watercolour Landscapes And Still-Lifes" - out five times in six months.

"How to sketch and paint the Nude" - out forty-seven times in six months.

"the History of Erotic Art" - out forty-nine times in six months.

A certain pattern emerging here?

Incidentally, "The History of Erotic Art" featured a few pictures (both paintings and photos) of girls between eight and fourteen that would have been seriously actionable in other contexts. This slightly bothers me - where exactly is the borderline between defensible artistic preresentation and paedophilia?

Well..yes. And Degas' famous ballerina statue? A fourteen year-old. Originally it was a realistic waxwork. Under the clothes she was modelled in intimate detail, down to pubic hair. She was exhibited in an installation which illustrated 'Common prostitutes and other gutter types.'

Forty-odd times in six months seems to be roughly twice per week.

Putting on my Devil's Advocate hat, the first thing it would make *me* wonder about would be whether a book taken out *that* often was actually any *good* (whether for study *or* self-gratification) if people only keep it for a day or three.

Indeed, unless it's down to the library only allowing something like 48-hour loans, it seems rather odd for so many loans to be so seemingly short - even for a useless book, many people would wait until their next shopping trip (at the weekend?) before returning it. Short of someone repeatedly borrowing a book for a few quick hours who is embarassed to take it home, I'm at a loss to understand the borrowing rates.

Particularly in the case of a 'how to' book on nude painting, (or watercolour painting, or any other supposedly vocational-related work), if it was remotely useful to an aspiring artist, I'd have thought it would have had spells of being out for weeks at a time, and so appear not to be taken out too often, as may be the case with some of the less-borrowed books, which may nonetheless have been much used by a few people.

Regarding the exhibition title 'common prostitute' could be considered as fundamentally pejorative or simply descriptive.
In UK law, it is used to describe someone *commonly* (as in frequently) offering their body for sale.
For people (prostitutes and others) who don't actually consider prostitution as bad, would they necessarily find the description offensive.
Weren't artist's models considered as prositutes at times, and weren't many models actual prostitutes in practice as well?

Though I'm not *defending* the particular choice of model, I wonder:

What was the age of consent when/where the statue was made? If someone was old enough to have sex, aren't they old enough to pose for an artist?
Why *shouldn't* the model be broadly anatomically incorrect - should it have been bowdlerised with some vague fuzziness in place of reality? Is it known if the modelling is specifically accurate, or just of generic genitals?

It seems the statue was originally intended to be shown in a particular salon, but that didn't happen and it was later shown elsewhere. How much influence did Degas have on the title of the exhibition?

Degas had it exhibited beside other drawings by him, illustrating 'Various criminal types.' (He was interested in the pseudo-scientific phyiogonomy of the time which held that you could predict personality and intellectual attributes from facial features)

As many men of his time, he had a lot of 'commercial sex' - but he seems to have had a particular predilection for young ballerinas. He regarded them as 'nasty gutter types' and paid a dance mistress to procure for him.

We can argue the age of consent thing - but certainly his behaviour wouldn't have been seen as respectable. When he died, his family had many of his pornographic works destroyed.

Then, of course, there was Caravaggio, who painted kiddie porn for one of the Medicis: http://www.phespirit.info/pictures/caravaggio/p039.htm. This was in the National's Caravaggio exhibition not so long ago.

Better qualify that last posting... yes,both frequently borrowed books had had their (apparent) spells of being out for up to the full three weeks at a time, although in my (non-too-rigourous)check on loan dates, the majority seem to be short-term borrowings...

I know a librarian well enough to ask, and she grinned and said during weekdays, the daytime clientele consists of mothers with kids, the retired, and the congenitially unemployable... only coming in at the weekend or during the evening, she said, I don't see the half of it!

There are, she said, a "hard core" of "dodgy borrowers" who see the library as a source of free/cheap pornography or near enough to it, as well as older schoolboys who'll try it on and say "It's for an art project, miss, honestly, I'm doing GCSE Art!" (To which the reply is, if they want to be nasty, "Look sonny, we've SEEN the GCSE Art syllabus, we provide set books to meet that, and you definitely do not study nudes at that age! A-level, maybe, but not at fourteen, come back in two years")

So there IS a "dirty mac" segment of library borrowers who'll come back at two or three day intervals to take out their "favourites", which is tolerated so long as the pages are NOT stuck together on return... my librarian contact says she has to steel herself to riff through the pages on loan and then on return, just in case the book is "damaged to the point of being unloanable", and then Take Steps to charge replacement to the borrower. This sounds like taking duty too far, but she said "Oh no, informally we owe them nothing and they can be trouble, so it's a way of reminding them there are rules and who enforces them!" (Apparently one of the more attractive girls working there was "stalked" by a slightly deranged borrower, so they got together to find grounds for his exclusion from the premises which involved "misuse of library property")

This is all shaping up to be one for the "Retail Rants" discussion...

Anyway, I raised the issue of the Erotic Art book with the pictures of very young girls, and my contact nodded and appreciated the points I was making.

I got to talk to a more senior librarian who shapes lending policy; his opinion was that an artist has to be able to make life drawings of human beings of both sexes, all ages and all physical conditions, which makes sense. There are practical difficulties in prviding life models who are under sixteen, so the only way to be able to do nudes of children is to work from books or photos or other people's work, which also makes sense.

But the senior librarian expressed an opinion that this kind of material is open to misuse and can lay the provider, ie the library, well open to trouble, so he considered that there was a case for it being "prove a need" - ie, show you are a bona fide art student or person with other legitimate reason - and we'll be happy to go downstairs to the restricted books section and get it for you. Which is, I think, a sensible compromise.

Now I'm not such a moron as to automatically equate nudity with sex, and I personally believe the paedophilia debate in Britain is 90% of the time neither a debate nor particularly well informed - a lot of it is hysterical screaming. (Look at the art gallery in London that was busted for showing some perfectly innocuous and rather sweet pics of naked children)

However, two of the pictures on "History of Erotic Art" were really troubling, enough so to leave a very vivid impression on my mind, and if I'm to describe them at all I'd do it as clinically as possible.

Picture One was a very well executed sketch of a girl, about seven or eight, full-frontally naked. Had that JUST been the case, I'd have said it was sweet and pleasant, in no way sexual, and a very nicely drawn image. What was ambiguous is that it was drawn on a very narrow width, cutting out most of the girl's arms: at about waist-level, a hand in a long black glove comes in and is stroking the girl's stomach. At the angle of entry, it MIGHT be the girl's own hand: but the edges of the frame cut out her elbows, if you see what I mean, and it could just as well be an adult hand. In either case, the juxtaposition of a naked pre-pubescent and a hand in a black glove is worrying. It takes a fairly innocuous nude and adds a sexualised dimension.

Picture Two is a photograph of two naked girls, about twelve or thirteen. The setting is an ordinary room in an ordinary house: both girls are naked, and one is sitting on a chair in such a way that her legs are apart and her vagina is open, and every physiological feature is visible. She looks as if she is unconsciously mimicking the standard legs-apart pose normally seen in a porn mag. The second girl is sprawling on a sofa with legs raised and spread: again everything is visible, aslthough again she only appears to be accidetally mimicking a porn pose: there's no forced smiling at the camera, for instance, both girls seem unaware the camera is there, and while the girl on the chair is hunched slightly forward at the shoulder in a fairly teenage slouch, the other appears to be perfectly comfortable, her pose suggests the kind of relaxed sprawl a young girl might make if she were wearing clothes, nothing about it is "forced" or un-natural. Neither of the girls is conventionally attractive: "plainly pretty" might sum them up, the sort of schoolgirls you wouldn't even give a passing glance to on the street. From hairstyles and other cues, it looks to have been taken in the 1980's.

Having described the photos, would you think these count as art? Both are maddeningly ambiguous, although they HAVE succeeded in getting into my mind and making me th9ink about the issues!

In terms of art training, though life drawing and painting can be extremely important, particularly for understanding anatomy, and useful in subsequent drawing of clothed subjects (just as the study of joints, muscles and other internal anatomy can be an aid to drawing a nude), I would have *thought* that such a need would be less important in the case of children, (especially young children who often have little obvious muscular development in any case), and even to the extent it *was* useful, much could be learnt from suitably clad children.
Possibly there may be call to paint the odd cherub, but I'd have thought that existing artworks would be sufficient for that, especially since many/most are stylised to the point where an actual baby or toddler would be less 'realistic' than art for that purpose.

I'll ask my (artist) sister when she returns from holiday. I don't *see* any life-drawing books in her collection, and I'm not sure if she actually has any - shes rather tends to collect books about specific artists, rather than 'how-to' guides, since she already 'can', but she may be aware of some from when she was teaching.

In terms of the erotic photography book, personally I don't see much justification for including children in a book self-defined in such a way. At best, it seems to be getting some distance into growing-up-too-soon territory.

Scanning through my sister's collection of Degas books, though it's obviously possible there was much that was destroyed, what seems to have survived does seem on the whole pretty tasteful.

Some nudes are definitely no spring chickens, some are of indeterminate younger age, though even then, many are quite sketchy, and I didn't notice any nudes looking specifically childlike.
There are many ballerina works as well, many of which are less sketchy and obviously young, but clothed.
His personal predelictions aside, I'd imagine that ballerinas would make excellent artist's models - used to taking graceful poses, and probably capable of holding them for a long time. Young ones may also be cheap, and possibly less likely to complain about painful poses.

His sketches of poor people of various shapes and sizes did seem to me to be almost universally sensitively done, but I didn't notice any pyhsiognomic drawings on my quick perusal. Even then, if drawings are accurately done, rather than being caricatures, from the art side, it isn't necessarily anything other than a study of odd faces (which artists were doing centuries before for various reasons) what they're *marketed as* is something else, but then I'm not particularly moved by that side of 'art'.

let`s see. In the town in which I work there is a monstruos creations of painted steel; some sort of red and green tubes pointing at the sky. I have seen it every day and think something like "useless piece of steel" until two years ago when around 6 am from 100 meters I`ve just seen two boats in the middle of the storm (the monstruos thing, a cloud and the rising sun).

Degas was in some ways a conceptual artist. Some of his ballerina bronzes and paintings were displayed alongside his physiogonomic (?) drawings and accompanying text.

Here's another thing...you'll have seen his pictures of 'women at their toilet' which feature a kind of shallow, dish-like bath? No such baths were used in 19thC France. It was specially commissioned the better to show of the prostitutes who he paid to watch as they washed.

Now...this isn't Degas bashing. I think his nudes are exceptional...as are the paintings he did of working women at the time of the Paris commune when he was painting from behind cataracts.

No...the only point that I'm trying to make is that there is little difference really between modern and conventional art. With both, yes...a lot is rubbish, its too expensive, it's sometimes produced for shock value or various nefarious purposes. Twas ever thus.

But was his stuff really produced for shock value (or to meet demand) and did the 'shocking' side of his work, such as it was, *depend* on shock value for the bulk of its appeal?
I'd assume that many (most?) people who promoted physiognomy didn't consider their ideas at all shocking, and they actually considered them correct.
If a particular artist actually *did* consider many of their models as worthless people, and that view was shared by many other people, then describing them as such wouldn't necessarily be anything other than simple description from the perspective of the time.

If an artist was perfectly unfazed by naked women, and found them good subjects for sketching and painting, I'd look at it rather differently to people who *appear* to be creating work with a primary intent to shock, like sticking genitals on the faces of statues, sexualised images of children, etc, posssibly for publicity, or possibly to draw attention away from a seeming lack of actual skill in execution or aesthetic merit.