Much as I hate to admit it, I'm beginning to see a practical (if fascistic) reason behind the Islamic prohibition on depictions of images. When the human image is rendered artificially, the result is often called art. Yet for murky cultural reasons, if the image is produced or created for commercial distribution on a large scale, it is less likely to be called art than if a single image is produced.

Thus, these Japanese pillows (via Drudge) are not considered art. They are sold and used to help Japanese men and Japanese women sleep.

Here's the guy pillow:

And here's the girl pillow:

Many Americans find this baffling, even frustrating. Yet if identical items were made here in the United States and displayed in art galleries, they'd raise nary an eyebrow.

Increasingly, if an image has a political message, no matter how strident or offensive that may be, it is considered by many to be the essence of art, and the failure to display it (or the removal of it from display) is called censorship. A recent example is featured in the New York Times:

Artwork in an exhibition that drew thousands to the Chelsea Market for its opening last week was abruptly taken down over the weekend after the market's managers complained about a portrait of President Bush fashioned from tiny images of chimpanzees, according to the show's curator.

Bucky Turco, who organized the show, said that a market director had expressed reservations about the Bush portrait, a small colorful painting by Christopher Savido that from afar appears to be a likeness of the president but viewed up close reveals chimps swimming in a marshy landscape.

The 23-year-old artist at the center of the controversy had been excited about the show. Mr. Savido said, "It's a portrait-slash-landscape and the monkeys just seemed to make sense. I saw one woman gave it the finger but I think it wasn't directed at the painting.""I came to New York to express myself," said Mr. Savido, 23, of Pittsburgh. "I would never have expected this censorship to happen here. I really feel powerless."

The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-bred artist said he was happy for all the attention paid to his work but said the decision to shutter the exhibit was "a blatant act of censorship."

Savido plans to auction the painting and donate proceeds to an organization dedicated to freedom of expression.

"This is much deeper than art. This is fundamental American rights, freedom of speech," Savido said. "To see that something like this can happen, especially in a place like New York City is mind boggling and scary."

But we must move on!

There are more images, and, as they're compellingly close to the theme of this blog, I must discuss them.

Dennis forwarded me a news report about male dancers depicting 5th-6th Century Greek Kouroi statues. Outraged viewers complained to the FCC about nude dancers portraying nude statues, forcing the NBC network to hand over a tape of the broadcast. Here's an uncensored image:

(Via Tea Leaves.)

Whether these statues are "historically accurate" is at least open to debate. The dancers are painted in gray, although according to a Reed College web site, it appears that the actual Kouroi were:

almost certainly painted so that the figure was skin-toned in hue with details like eyes, lips and hair picked out in appropriate colors.

While the legal issue will turn on whether or not the dancers' penises [they appear to be facsimiles of "archaic penises" if such absurdities can be] were shown on television, NBC claims it showed the dancers from the waist up. Is nudity the issue? I can't prove it, but I strongly suspect that the people who are upset about these dancers are upset because they think they smell a gay theme. They're not alone; some of the statues' proponents are unable to contain their suspicions. Again, "gay" is the wrong word, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, but that's irrelevant to the proponents and the opponents of the statues, who want to see a modernistic "gay" theme. Culture war thrives on romanticized idiocy on parade. (No such romanticization at this web site -- which ties together the Kouroi of ancient Greece with the Kuroi of modern Japan.)

If traditional Islam had its way, of course, all these images and more would be treated the way the Taliban treated the famous 2000-year-old statues in Afghanistan.

Right now, I think it's entirely appropriate to return to the theme of Greco-Buddhism (touched on in an earlier post), because the giant statues the Taliban blew up were considered classics of Greco-Buddhism:

In 327 BC, Alexander the Great led his army through Afghanistan towards India. Shortly after, Buddhism spread in Bamiyan, developing a unique form of art known as the Greco-Buddhist style from the Gandhara area.

The Buddhas and the fresco paintings on the surrounding niche walls were examples for this style, the figures‘ showing the Greek influence clearly in the style the folds of their dresses were carved.

The statues - one 53, the smaller one 38m in height - were constructed between the 2nd and the 7th century, the first one being built by order of Emperor Kanishka. They were carved from the soft sandstone of the Kohe Baba mountains around and then covered with a mixture of straw and mud to model the details of their faces. Both were painted, allegedly one red, one blue, and covered with gold which of course disappeared over the centuries.

But the gold fading away was not the worst happening to the Buddhas. Their faces were sawn off following an order by the Persian King Nadir Shah Afshar in 1747. The Taliban were not as sensitive and by far better equipped; they completed the statues destruction in 2001 and by that wiped out the until then biggest known standing statue of Buddha in the world.

The violently iconoclastic approach of radical Islam, while perhaps understandable in light of their medieval cultural frustrations, creates a backlash which ultimately ends up promoting the message they seek to destroy. Here's Charles Paul Freund:

Until their destruction, the statues were mostly unknown except to those specializing in Gandharan art, a syncretic Greco-Buddhist mix. Even admirers of Buddhist art have focused on more graceful examples found elsewhere in Asia.

Modern Western travelers failed entirely to appreciate the statues' value. Robert Byron, in his 1934 account of Central Asian art and architecture, The Road to Oxiana, wrote of the statues that "Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of pride in their monstrous, flaccid bulk, that sickens. … A host of monastic navvies were given picks and told to copy some frightful semi-Hellenistic image from India or China. The result has not even the dignity of labor."

That they'd served as military targets for Muslim armies, that the legs of the larger Buddha had been destroyed in the 18th century by Persians, was unlamented. As recently as the 1970s, the art academic and historian Wilfrid Blunt dismissed the statues as merely "grotesque."

So how did the carved Buddhas of Bamiyan go from reviled grotesquerie to "things which are valuable to humanity and its heritage," indeed so valuable they must be rebuilt? There's nothing like a staged spectacle of barbaric destruction to transform otherwise obscure artifacts. Such an act provides relevant and apparent meaning to a work even as it destroys that work. The Taliban actually alerted the world to their impending act, allowed it to be recorded, and released the images, multiplying the effect with drama.

There is of course a very long history of intentionally destroyed art. Sometimes the destruction involves works acknowledged to be art, even by the destroyer; sometimes, as in the Taliban's case, the issue of "art" is beside the point. But whether the perpetrators have been Nazis destroying "degenerate" art, French or Russian revolutionaries destroying religious work, or the many examples of iconoclastic uprisings and library burnings, the story usually ends the same way: The lost artifacts leave behind them a shadow of martyrdom, a meaning that will long outlive the destroyer.

Speaking of Hellenistic stuff, no one seems to be in any hurry to excavate the Roman baths in Nazareth. (Original link via the Flea; also discussed infra last year.) The official Palestinian line, of course, is that the Romans were never in Israel (er, "Palestine") at all -- because that would mean the Jews once lived there. (No, seriously!) Modern Christian sects don't seem to be terribly enthusiastic about the idea of Nazareth as a Roman military town either.

(Politicized history is another subject, of course, but it's almost as bad as politicized art. )