Nan Goldin, Elton John, and a Police Raid

In 2001 Scotland Yard ordered Saatchi Gallery in London to remove three photographs from an exhibition — including one titled "Klara and Edda Belly-Dancing" from photographer Nan Goldin's Thanksgiving series — claiming that they were child pornography. The gallery refused but no charges were pressed — the Crown Prosecution Service told the AP that there was not "a realistic prospect of conviction."

And yet the same Goldin photograph is under scrutiny again, after an employee at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in nothern England reported it to police just before an exhibition of Thanksgiving opened there on September 21st. As a result, musician Elton John, who loaned the work to the Baltic Centre, had the remaining 148 photographs in the series taken down. "It was always intended that the installation be exhibited as a whole, and not on a piecemeal basis, and our decision has been made with regard to the artistic integrity of the work and the artist," a statement on his website says. (Consideration of artist's intent does still live, then.)

Apart from providing fodder for the tabloids — "Elton: Baltic porn row picture belongs to me" and "Banned racy pix are owned by — Elton John" were two of the choicest hysterical headlines — this has, of course, sparked a debate about what constitutes pornography and what is art.

To some extent, the issue comes down to intent. Pornography is defined as "films, magazines, writings, photographs, or other materials that are sexually explicit and intended to cause sexual arousal." Did Goldin mean for her photograph of Klara and Edda to elicit some sort of sexual response? It was simply one of the images she captured to document her life from 1973 to 1999. Could someone see it as pornography? Maybe. But, as Jenny Blyth, the curator of the Saatchi exhibition said to the AP in 2001, "A perverted mind can see indecency in anything."

(Full disclosure: I used to work for the gallery that represents Goldin.)

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