Lastly, the article states that in Miller v. California, the Supreme court created a three-part test for determining if expression is considered legally obscene. Works must meet all three parts of this test to fall outside of First Amendment protection. Those parts are:

• “A work may be banned as obscene only if taken as a whole, the average person, applying contemporary standards would consider it to appeal to the prurient interest;

• It depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive manner;

• And it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

   

I will get to my opinion in a minute, but I want to pose some questions to you? If someone posts photos of their nude child - say in a bathtub - in a public place (a museum perhaps?), does that constitute child abuse? What if it was identical to the photographs stated above? A child jumping on a table? Does it have to have malicious intent to be considered abuse, or does the fact that it can be accessed by a predator make it abuse? If there was a way to prevent predators from viewing the photo, would it be considered art? Or as the ACLU Texas states, are the photographs allowed to be displayed as art because they were “neither intended nor designed to excite lust in the viewer. They do what much art does – convey ideas and invite viewers to reflect on the human experience?”

 

And now for my opinion on the matter. As I have never seen these photos for myself, I can only speculate on how “nude” the children were. That being said, there is a form of trust that is required when it comes to the Fort Worth police department decision to pull the photographs. The article states that they are conducting an investigation, which suggests that their actions may have been more about preventing potential harm to the children and mitigating further controversy—if there was any harm to begin with. In this case, removing the photographs, at least temporarily, seems like a precautionary measure. It’s better to be safe than sorry, and by taking down images that some considered obscene, they effectively halted the perceived issue. 

The second thing that came to mind as I read this article was, if the children were indeed fully nude, and private parts were visible in the photographs, why did the artist choose to show them that way? Could you convey the same message through a photograph if the child had a long T-shirt on, or maybe a set of pajamas? Would clothes really have diminished the artistic intent? As a parent of several children, I probably have a few photos of them in the tub, but it has never occurred to me to show them publicly. Am I abnormal for not showing them publicly?

 

I think there should be some form of common sense in the art world where an age limit for nudity is established, and anyone above that age limit should give consent to display their nude body. Obviously, we can’t retroactively censor artists like Monet, Picasso or Van Gough, and we shouldn’t start hiding historic art in back rooms or basements, however, common sense should have prevailed in this case, on the part of the artist, the museum’s leadership, and those responsible for the curating the exhibition.

 

Ultimately, art is in the eye of the beholder, and this recent article post is a great example of that.  In it, artist Walead Beshty sends glass block through the mail all over the country, allowing them to break in transit. Some people on the Facebook post I saw dismissed the idea entirely, calling it pointless, or made jokes about how this artist was highlighting FedEx’s poor shipping practices. I personally enjoy the rough, chaotic, and unpredictable nature of this series, and am a bit disappointed that I didn’t think of it first (lucky duck Mr. Beshty!)