Vilks banned by city council
Flemming Rose reports that Modog artist Lars Vilks has been barred from exhibiting at the Esloev Bennale in south Sweden.
Celilia Lind, a Social Democrat member of the city council, said:
It’s an unnecessary provocation to allow Vilks to join the exhibition…Many people are offended by his art
Another Social Democrat, Kahlid El-Haj, explained that, as a Muslim, he was offended on behalf of the 1 billion Muslims around the world.
But there has been resistance. Art critic Pontus Kyander has called on the judiciary to take action, claiming that the censorship is a violation of the Swedish constituion:
It’s not for local authorities to decide which artists are permitted to exhibit their work. It’s a local berufsverbot. The right to free speech is thoroughly defended in the constitution, and especially artistic freedom has wide limits… As I see it, Esloev city council has violated the constitution, and the case need to be given af hearing in court.
Some Vilks supporters invited the Danish artist Uwe Max Jensen to take his place. Jensen received a copy of one of Vilks’s Motoons, and erased it with a rubber as an act of protest. The resulting blank piece of paper will be displayed in the room where Vilks’s work was supposed to be shown. It is entitled Erase Mohammed.
An “unnecessary provocation”? Bullshit! Is art not meant to bloody well provoke? If it doesn’t, it’s not doing its job. So, with that out of the way, what, then, is the difference between a necessary provocation and an unnecessary provocation? These people make you sick.
[…] artist, Lars Vilks – whose MoDog cartoons earned him death threats from Al Qaida – has been barred (via) from exhibiting his work at the Esloev Bennale in south Sweden. No-one knows what Vilks was […]