View From the Bushes

Where I work they recently took a corner and designated it as an "Art Space." The idea is that anyone can sign-up to display their art there for two months. A good friend of mine here at work was the first to sign up and has been displaying his photos for the last month and a half. A week ago he swapped out the photos. One of the new photos showed two men (one of them shirtless) in an obvious display of affection. At this point I don't think anyone would have batted an eyelid, but maybe I'm wrong, but then he went ahead and added a caption, "Until all of us are free, none of us are free."

By the time I heard about it on Tuesday afternoon, the legal department had become involved and my friend the artist had been exchanging e-mails the whole day with the head of Human Resources. I bumped into him on my way home and we spent about a half an hour discussing it in the parking lot. I told him that it was that caption that put it over the line, that it took what was a reasonably tame artistic statement and made it into a fairly confrontational political statement -- which most companies are going to want to avoid. The counter-example I gave him is what if someone wanted to put up a picture of an aborted fetus and caption it, "The power of choice," then what grounds would the company have, after allowing his picture, to reject this one?

Anyway we went back and forth for a while before going our separate ways. That night I guess he thought about it quite a bit, with my words still ringing in his ears (okay, maybe I'm taking too much credit) and finally decided to take the picture down. Well, when he went in Wednesday morning to do just that he found that someone had taken a big piece of cardboard, tucked it behind the top frame and then folded it over so that it covered the picture. Well, he took it down and told the person in charge of the art space that he had done so and then mentioned the cardboard. Well, then the director went on the war path and posted a letter in the vacant space addressed to the person who had taken it upon himself to censor the piece. In the letter she mentioned that the piece had been "defaced" which wasn't technically true, so then my friend decided to put up his own letter, mentioning that no damage had been done to the piece. Overall, quite the exciting week.

In other news, North Korea has agreed to give up its nukes. Yeah, right...

Buried in cynicism
Ross