For hot New York art curator Savannah Spirit, it was just a matter of course that she’d share images from her latest show, Hotter Than July: A Sexploration, with her 2000 + friends on Facebook. The show, which opened on January 15 at the New York Studio Gallery, had a unifying theme of “what feels good and what gets us off,” bringing together a group of work from various artists that represents sex without judgment or shame.
Sadly, the folks over at Facebook didn’t bother to reserve judgment on the show, and instead pulled her account without warning on the day opened. Spirit didn’t notice until the day after, when she logged into her account to see what kind of comments the works and the show generated – and she found herself a part of a social network that is growing larger all the time – artists and others who have been censored by Facebook.
“Around the world, the artistic community has embraced Facebook as an essential part of our networking strategies,” said Spirit, who noted that Facebook is an essential part of both life and business for her. “It seems completely arbitrary that Facebook would go out of their way to censor the works of an art show under the grounds that the works are “sexually suggestive” while at the same time hosting sites for magazines like Playboy and others.”
But as is often the case with censored works, the Facebook shut-down had a real upside for the show, which ended up garnering a lot more attention than it may have otherwise after word got around SoHo that Spirit’s show got her account pulled from Facebook. Spirit’s page was not the only one targeted by Facebook for the show in question – a featured artist from the show, Marne Lucas, also had her page pulled, and the resulting publicity in the New York art world sent droves of people to the show, and inspired other artists in the community to post on their pages about her show and how her page had been taken down.
The situation created so much hub-bub that New York Magazine art critic, Jerry Saltz, chose the show as one of his picks of the week – and for Spirit and her artists, the Facebook Effect has created lots of waves for the show, driving up attendance for the entire run and an expected large crowd for the closing show party, scheduled for February the 12th. Both curator and artist had their pages reinstated by the end of January, but for Spirit, this is an issue that isn’t going to go away. “Facebook makes pretty arbitrary decisions about what to take down,” she said. “Their rules are vague and not as transparent as they could be. This kind of thing is happening to artists all over the world – and people are getting really sick of it.”
Source: All Facebook
Monday, February 7, 2011