It wasn't all that long ago that lefties were sneering at Attorney General Ashcroft's supposed draping of a nude statue in the DOJ building. But the left has come right back around again.
It is a painting that shows pubescent, naked nymphs tempting a handsome young man to his doom, but is it an erotic Victorian fantasy too far, and one which, in the current climate, is unsuitable and offensive to modern audiences?
Manchester Art Gallery has asked the question after removing John William Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs, one of the most recognisable of the pre-Raphaelite paintings, from its walls. Postcards of the painting will be removed from sale in the shop.
By "modern" audiences, they mean Victorian audiences. Or whatever the Neo-Victorians of the left are pretending to be these days.
I've never cared for pre-Raphaelite paintings and Hylas and Nymphs is fairly typical of a certain class of painting that was in self-conscious bad taste. But that's a subjective view. The same people who would put up exhibitions of Mapplethorpe photographs and Piss Christ, suddenly decided that there was something inappropriate about a classic painting. There's a sense of confused prudery but no morals.
The work usually hangs in a room titled In Pursuit of Beauty, which contains late 19th century paintings showing lots of female flesh.
Gannaway said the title was a bad one, as it was male artists pursuing women’s bodies, and paintings that presented the female body as a passive decorative art form or a femme fatale.
Gannaway said the debates around Time’s Up and #MeToo had fed into the decision.
The left very conveniently shifted the debate from leftists raping women to whatever they deem rape culture. In this case, a mythological painting.
And if it uses this line of reasoning, museums will be emptied before too long. And that may be exactly what they want. It'll be a lot easier to fill the empty rooms with red squares and piles of sugar packets, dissected animals, bodily fluids and The Artist is Present.
Is this what the new puritans are demanding? Titian’s flagrant nudes, Modigliani’s prominent pudenda, must go then. Salome, both the play by Oscar Wilde and the opera by Richard Strauss, deals with a frustrated homicidal young girl, a much more disturbing view of female sexuality than Waterhouse’s painting, in an exquisitely beautiful way. Should it be banished from the stage? Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Bizet’s Carmen have been criticised for related reasons.
Leftists sneer that religious people are afraid of sex. Yet it's the left that seems enmeshed in cultural sexual panics on a weekly basis.
Meanwhile the Manchester Art Gallery will have an exhibit of the works of Waqas Khan, a Pakistani doodler who produces rows of dotted lines, another Pakistani artist who draws pictures of construction work in her home country, and another artist who appears to have produced a statue of Spider Man.
The left hates what is beautiful in society, in culture, in art and thought, and seeks to destroy it so it can replace it with the ugly image of its own shriveled soul.