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you assume that there was no prior showing of either the piece of a slide of the piece during the planning phases of the show.
and that the gallery owner did not see the show after it was hung, before the opening.
according to your scenario, carn, everything was a surprise to the owner, who then reacted to the affront of the piece
when if you actually read the article, it looks like what was the affront was the size of the crowd drawn by the show...
the owner obviously knew what was going up on the walls in his space. the owner was fine with it.... until alot of people turned up for the opening, at which point something changed. i think the guy was fine with everything until it came to the point where he might end up being too publicly associated with the piece. the decision to show it in the first place appears to have been based on a calculation he made about a certian level of publicity being attracted to the gallery----but not too much. once the boundary was exceeded, he--the owner---flipped out.
that is one reason i find the decision to be beneath contempt.
none of this has anything to do with any idea that he was required to show a given piece simply because it existed. that is ridiculous as an argument both in itself and with reference to this situation.
and if you correlate the relative lack of both public funding for the arts and spaces for showing art in the states, it looks like you are arguing that censorship does not exist in the states at all. what a bad person might do is confuse weak, absurd exercize of the perogatives of property ownership with censorship. but that would only be a bad person who would think this way. obviously in a situation where private property is absolutely sacrosanct, there can be no censorship.
and given that there can be no censorship, it should follow that the message to younger artists that they should be servile, be nice, is only a problem because some gauche individuals force the righteous owners of property into the breach of decorum of having to say what should, by rights, go without saying.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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