And some like you are telling me what is it OK to show pedofilia motivated things on public. Why, if this is falling on people in real life and here is no help...
I would have preferred not to post in this thread again. But - this is still totally unbelievable for me to see people here wildly confusing art and what daily happens in the streets.
Kostya : Balthus was an artist and a painter. Some of his paintings may be linked to some mental representations of some emotions related to his own mental inner self vision of what a lascive and lazy young girl could make him think of, at some point. He never was called a paedophile. Never ever. He never was caught at doing some paedophiliac things. Never ever (OK, before you write it, I know that it's not because you are not caught that you must be innocent etc, and I am aware of what happened around his Polaroids and an exhibition of his work which had to take place in Germany in 2014). He painted what came in his mind. For the painting in question : had he an in-the-flesh model ? Or did he rather just paint from memory without any model, or without asking the young model to put her leg up and display her panty ? This you don't know.
He did what Thomas Mann just did when wrote "Death in Venice", after which Luchino Visconti made a film which is considered a fantastic masterpiece (and so is the book). Did you read that book ? Have you seen the movie ? If yes, do you think that the scenes when the professor Aschenbach looks at the young Tadzio playing in his bathsuit should be removed and forbidden ? Do you think that the book (and the movie), which are built around the emotions an old and very educated man, just about to die, feels when he looks at a extraordinarily beautiful teenager, is just about paedophilia ? Come on.
Can't you just get it ? Can't you just get that there is a difference between what happens in the real life of real people and what some artists try to make us think of or consider ?
You like photography yourself. Both Irving Penn and Martine Franck (you know who they are) took great portraits of Balthus, at different moments of his life. Do you think that people like Irving Penn and Martine Franck would have portraited a paedophile ? OK, before you write it, I know that it's not because you take the portrait of someone being a paedophile that you must be aware he is that kind of person when you take the photos etc. But. Yet. Come on again.
There is absolutely nothing related to paedophilia in the Balthus' painting those people want the MET to hide or remove. Nothing.
Now let's get out of the box and put it that way : if a said-artist was to build a live performance in a modern art museum setting some paedophiliac things at stage, he/she would for sure and with good reason be arrested and enforced immediatly. Yes, with some very good and no questionable reason. Then I wouldn't have to think that we were dealing with stupid and narrow-minded people wanting to restraint the public liberties and the free expression of the artists (including some dead great artists of the past).
Second attempt : the model (if she exists) of the painting in question suddenly comes out and tells : "I got sexually abused by Balthus at some point, the circumstances were (...)". Then, some others young women having posed for Balthus come out and say something similar. Now this would be a completely different problem.
This is what happened recently for David Hamilton when former models revealed things. Problem is, that many people were aware of David Hamilton's behaviour in the 1970's already. And still, there was an omerta about that.
At the end of the day, do you get the difference between pointing real paedophiliac behaviours out then suing real people, and asking a Museum for the removal of a painting because that painting may be, from far to close in some random people minds, linked to some supposed dark thoughts of the painter ? Can you just try to, for a couple of minutes ?
