Flesh, Desire, Exploitation and Art

There has been some interesting commentary on the issue of the sexualisation and commodification of women and girls in the wake of the Australia Institute Report controversially entitled Corporate Paedophilia. Excellent discussion can be found Hoyden about Town, Larvatus Prodeo and the Bartlett Diaries.

Personally, the topic brought to mind one of my favourite images from the Burn series i did five years ago, entitled 'nipple'. (For a gal enamoured with metaphor, i was being oddly literal with this title.) The spiel from the exhibition is below.

Burn baby burn is a series of digital images of skin, the body, ash, fire and electric coils by artist Tanja Stark. Sexualised coil images infused with sadistic/masochistic and fetish undercurrents, such as 'nipple' (digital photograph 2001), explore the paradoxical nature of desire and exploitation. The inherent meaning of the work is complex and undefined. Are the images about reclaiming control of the body, or have the electric coils evolved into targets? Perhaps the act of branding flesh in some way associates women with cattle, as something to be marked, owned, or, to continue a recurring theme, consumed....?

I've come out against the creeping ( and often overt) sexualisation of increasingly younger and younger girls, but where do i stand on the issue of the sexualisation of adult women? Is it a cop out to say its complex? Can't i have my (pan)cake (make-up) and wear it too? I'll have to think about this a little and get back on this one. (i wish i could express myself in words as well as in pictures.)

Speaking of pictures and art, its nice to know rich people are as clutzy as the rest of us. According to someone who was there, shortly after finalising the $135 million sale of Picasso's Le Reve (the Dream) Milllionare owner Steve Wynn accidently fell into the canvas tearing a hole right through the chubby arm of its blissful subject, screwing up the deal. In a spectacular show of perpective, hapless Stevo is said to have later observed "“My feeling was, It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.”