Five teenagers have been arrested and three girls taken to hospital after an underage dance party at Darling Harbour.
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Maurice O’Riordan’s view on nude children as art wrong
Piers Akerman
AUSTRALIA’S arts community needs to drag itself back into reality.
It might start by showing some intelligence and maturity, but perhaps that is too much to expect if Maurice O’Riordan, editor of the taxpayer-subsidised Art Monthly magazine, is representative of those who wish to be seen as our cultural arbiters.
O’Riordan is responsible for putting a fairly innocuous photograph of a naked little girl on the cover of his magazine as a statement against censorship following the furore that erupted over the recent exhibition of photos of nude children taken by artist Bill Henson.
Henson’s works have long been acknowledged by critics to be edgy, to tease viewers with their sexualisation of pubescent kids captured as they metamorphose from childhood to adolescence.
There is no dispute about that, Henson found a niche, just as artists like the late Robert Mapplethorpe, who challenged his audiences with his confronting pictures of homosexuals with objects inserted in their posteriors, found (no pun intended) a niche. Their images may well be artistic, but that doesn’t mean they occupy particularly savoury niches.
O’Riordan, however, slipped further into the slime and dragged supporters of the arts community with him by his self-acknowledged attempt to “validate nudity and childhood as subjects for art; to surrender to the power of the imagination (in children and adults) and dialogue without crippling them through fear-mongering and repression”.
This is unadulterated humbug of the first order. He is not alone however, for he was joined in his flaccid argument by Robert Nelson, the art critic father of the little girl whose pictures O’Riordan published.
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The African president
Andrew Bolt
David Blair says George Bush will retire as an African hero:
In the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, America’s direct bilateral assistance to Africa was only Pounds 700 million. Mr Bush has almost quadrupled this sum.
Combating Aids once played virtually no part in America’s development policies. Mr Bush has established the biggest fund ever devoted to fighting an epidemic.
The President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, funded to the tune of Pounds 7.5 billion, is paying for hundreds of thousands of Africans to receive the life-saving drugs which hold Aids at bay.
Mr Bush has also made America the biggest single donor to the Global Fund for Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, contributing one third of its Pounds 5 billion.
No other leader has given as much money to the World Food Programme as Mr Bush. America now provides about half of all the emergency food aid distributed across the globe.
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Obama in Iraq quagmire
Andrew Bolt
Obama was against it before he was for it. Now where have we heard that before?
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Bright Matonga isn’t
Andrew Bolt
How the racist card gets played these days:
ZIMBABWE’S government said today that the G8 leaders’ rejection of President Robert Mugabe’s legitimacy and threats of financial measures against his regime are racist…
“They want to undermine the African Union and (South African) President Mbeki’s (mediation) efforts because they are racist, because they think only white people think better,” said Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga.
“It’s an insult to African leaders,” Mr Matonga said.
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Close to China, far from ideals
Andrew Bolt
Is this the Labor party that Kevin Rudd’s ministers joined?
Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has accused Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of abandoning human rights in the region.
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Sceptics grow bold
Andrew Bolt
Is a tide turning? From today’s newspapers, three more sceptics speak out against the warming hysteria: Tony Rutherford, Chris Kenny and Michael Duffy.
Why, it’s almost becoming respectable again to doubt.
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Laugh, or die of fright
Andrew Bolt
Wait until the warming fanatics get to work on your gases, too:
In a bid to understand the impact of the wind produced by cows on global warming, scientists collected gas from their stomachs in plastic tanks attached to their backs.
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And in the crazies’ corner…
Andrew Bolt –
Gee, thanks for the leper’s bell, Tony. Reader Foehn reports on how tonight’s Q&A is being sold:
Andrew, I am listening to the ABC666 radio in Canberra. Tony Jones is being interviewed and just described you one of the “last, few remaining sceptics”. Craig Emerson, on the other hand, is a brilliant economist with “a degree”. Christine Milne, is an “expert in carbon trading”. Helen Coonan is “now in Opposition”.So pleasing to see he is being so even-handed about this. Not. Its par for the course for him.
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Picked him
Andrew Bolt
I really don’t think the ABC’s The Hollowmen is going to help Kevin Rudd at all
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Nelson’s daughter: sex and sucking the pacifier
Andrew Bolt
Age art critic Robert Nelson replied here yesterday to the seven questions I put to him about his decision to publish naked pictures of his six-year-old daughter, taken by his wife.
Those pictures were published in Arts Monthly Australia to defend artist Bill Henson’s right to take pornographic shots of a naked 13-year-old girl.
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Pose and prepare
Andrew Bolt
Perhaps wise, after all:
CHILDREN as young as four should have sex education at school, Victoria’s leading sex education provider says.
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Rudd’s plan killed already
Andrew Bolt
The only surprise is that this is still news:
EMERGING industrial giants India and China have refused to fall into line with the richest nations on cutting greenhouse emissions, as Kevin Rudd urged the world’s most powerful leaders to build a “grand new consensus” on climate change.
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Blaming blacks may be right, but is also convenient
Andrew Bolt
Well, yes, but if Tony Abbott had said it....
HEALTH Minister Nicola Roxon will today demand indigenous people take more responsibility for their health by giving up smoking and drinking or at least cutting their alcohol intake to responsible levels.
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Taxing petrol won’t save us
Andrew Bolt
Ziggy Switkowski does the sums, to check if Kevin Rudd’s plan to make us pay more for petrol under his Emissions Trading Scheme will make a blind bit of difference to the climate:
Yes, prices will go up a bit but will this reduce demand, lead us to use public transport more, or experiment with battery-powered vehicles? Perhaps, but not by enough to make a measurable difference. A good guess might be that GHG [greenhouse gases] growth will flatten and might eventually turn negative. This is a worthy enough outcome, although in a world of 35 billion tonnes of annual GHG emissions, a possible reduction of 10 million tonnes annually from Australian vehicles in a couple of decades needs to be put into perspective.
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A real tyrant for the Left
Andrew Bolt
Michael Kroger:
I scoured newspapers of the world for reports of demonstrations outside the Zimbabwean embassies and consulates across the world, or those of the South African Government. I looked for evidence of demonstrations outside the UN headquarters in New York. I searched for reports of widespread demonstrations in the streets of London, Paris, Berlin or Washington against the brutality of the Mugabe regime. Surely some of those who opposed white rule in South Africa and what was then Rhodesia would be similarly repulsed by the butchery of Mugabe and his supporters.
But where are the peaceniks, the greens, the anti-war demonstrators, the churches, the democrats, the human rights activists and others who committed so much energy to freeing South Africa and Zimbabwe from oppressive rule a generation ago? Where are those tens of thousands who marched against the war in Iraq?
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NSW Govt deserves support in bitter battle
The NSW Government has made its fair share of mistakes, but in this increasingly vicious battle with the union movement, they deserve the public's support, according to Alan Jones. - no they don't. - ed.
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