graham ovenden sentencing and lord mcalpine

Oy! I'm having a conversation!

Don't you think you've said it all now when. Time to stop perhAps?

Comletely agree with you Petallus. I'm no expert on child abuse and would never pretend to be. I feel outraged, though, when abusive images are bandied about with no consideration for the real people who die inside every time they remember that their pictures are out there, and they can't stop it.

Is the picture you're referring to called something like L'Origine Du Monde? That's a provocative painting like you have descibed. It's in a French museum. I'm sure I've seen it.

when I know you have had a lot of experience with victims of child abuse professionally.

However, the rest of us are not likely to be completely ignorant on the topic. There are many books around which describe what it was like to be a victim of horrific abuse, some of us have friends who were abused and, statistically speaking, some of us quite likely to have been abused ourselves.

Just saying!

I've been at a funeral all day and only just read through the thread.

If we are talking about what is acceptable and what is abusive in art, does anyone else hate that well known explicit painting of a woman's genitals, called something like 'Gateway to the World'. It's by a well-known artist whose name I cannot recall just now. Probably the same one that did a painting of a woman having an orgasm.

There was quite a to do about Tierney Gearon a few years ago. I didn't like the photos and couldn't understand what she thought she was doing.

numberplease I agree!

Has this thread really put a bad downer on anyone else's day?

Why did I walk into this one.

He has been spared prison because he`s "no longer a threat". Whether that is the case or not, he should still be punished for what he did.

Yes, I didn't like the masks, either.

The masks on the children make them somehow, questionable. But, as Geraldine insinuates, they were shown by the mother. So that apparently is ok.

I'd never heard of Tierney Gearon until jo posted about her. I've been to look and I'm not sure what her oeuvre adds to this debate. Other than confirming the impression that some artists just like to play at being transgressive. There was a nice picture of a cat, though.

Jingle charming family photos by Tierney Gearon, who has slipped up by displaying a couple of them as they are open to interpretation. The Abusive Images Unit have questioned her motive in dsplaying them and are satisfied there is no deviant motive. She is charting her family's story and Saatchi invited her to dsplay them. Personally, I would not share such photos outsde the family.

I agree that the daft rule about photographing chidren in the school nativity, or playing in the park, has been used to extremes.

The pictures will still be displayed.They have not been declared illegal.

I think the Tate took them down before, and put them back up later.

The link that Jingle put on here a few minutes ago shows a different scenario of innocence, not innocent children portrayed in a sexualised way. Not my cup of tea, but we're all different.

I do think if I'd been standing in a gallery viewing those pictures, I would have felt suspicious. As you say when, a pity he couldn't have stuck to painting children as children.

I doubt any major gallery will exhibit them now.

There are some dubious pictures of children showing at the Saatchi gallery at the moment by Tierney Gearon. I dare n' t put a link. Someone would surely faint.

j08 Hmmm, Bronzino wasn't convicted (or charged, or suspected -note to descendants) of child abuse but it does illustrate your point.

There is a danger in an over zealous and hysterical attitude to child abuse. I would place banning photos in public parks, videoing school productions in that bracket.

It's sad that many children are actually quite scared of unknown adults now and also that many would feel they couldn't intervene if a child was lost and in distress in a public place as their motives might be misconstrued.

I was ruminating above on whether child abuse is more prevalent now than in the past or is it as per the Jimmy Saville et al cases, less acceptable. I do believe there are degrees of abuse.

Before everyone jumps on that last comment - I am not condoning child abuse, or rape.

No, Jingle not pornographic

Sel if you have looked at the gallery of pictures that are immediately available, they included the one that Jingle posted. Ovenden is undoubtably a brillant artist, but his fascination for what he sees as Lolita-type literature and erotica, and what the law defines as evidence of child abuse, has been his undoing. His distorted thinking is shared and supported by many people who only see what has been openly displayed. If they had a glimpse of the reality of child sexual abse, they would be sickened.

There are some beautiful paintings depicting the innocence, mischief and wonder of childhood, and it's a pleasure to admire them. Shame he coudn't stick to treating children as children because now his whole collection is defiled.

He will have childhood exeriences that have led him to develop his deviant sexual interest in children. I feel compassion for the child he was, but not for the adult he became. Most children who have been harmed in this way become responsible adults.

The painter, Ovenden, committed his crimes with the subjects of his paintings jingl. If a pervert painted a picture of your grandchild, and in the process of doing so committed a sex crime against that child, would you want that picture to be freely available?

That's a fair point Jo numbers, but I would take issue with the idea that these images were always accepted by the general public and by 'art experts'.

Feminist commenters and art critics have long held a discourse about the objectification of women in art, about the way women are the focus of the male gaze, about the way women are so often infantilised in images and the fascination of so many 'artists' with prostitutes.

I think this would be a useful subje t for a new thread. But just to pose a question, perhaps you could take a look at a very well known Victorian painting of a prepubescent girl seated (I'll see if I can find a link soon) she wears a red fur trimmed coat and her hands are concealed in a muff.

Art - or - exploitation?

You going to delete that now Gransnet?

pornographic?

Don't get me wrong. I don't, myself, like the pictures. But I do wonder how they came to be accepted by the general public, and art experts too, for so many years. Until, in fact, the painter was exposed as having committed some child sex abuse crimes. And then everyone shrieks in horror at them. The painting remain exactly the same.

Could it be part of the climate engendered by Saville?

when I have looked at the pictures - I don't know if the ones I saw were those Jo had linked to but what I did see,, disturbed me. I am not looking at them innocently though, but with the knowledge that this man was convicted.

My point though was that without seeing the pictures, I had nothing to base an opinion on.

I don't think anyone on here is attempting to make a case for the acceptance of child abuse or child pornography or denying the life long effects.

I wonder what the statistics are. Is there more sexual abuse of children now or just more knowledge of it? I had never even heard of such a thing until my mid twenties. Given that finding children sexually attractive is a condition of the mind, one presumes it was ever present but is there more now?