Letters

Real enemies of art not artists

Ben Shapiro makes several, dare I say, valid statements in his
unoriginal column “Art
is not always art in the eye of the beholder, masses“
(Viewpoint, Feb. 11) ““ but he fails to back up his
statements.

Sarah Goodwin, my classmate and friend, who was responsible for
the photographs in the UCLA exhibition Shapiro cited, was indeed
“compar·(ing) little girls with adult women.” But
Shapiro didn’t have the courtesy to contact her to explain
her work. Instead, he thoughtlessly and conveniently wrote it off
as child porn when the piece was hardly such.

He claims that “this generation has seen the corruption of
art,” and I totally agree with him. However, it is not the
artists who are contributing to the denigration of art. It’s
the rich tycoons that exploit their financial power that warp the
exploration and expression art provides and make it into something
commercially consumable. It is they who arbitrarily decide what art
is “good” or “bad.” Those who commercialize
art ““ along with those who do not take a moment to try and
see what the artist is really attempting to communicate ““ are
the true enemies of art. It doesn’t take an imaginary
“intellectual” to see that art has deeper meaning.

A virtue of art is that a person who may behold an image and/or
an act has the privilege of reacting to the art and forming an
opinion based on it. Shapiro, like many who unfortunately have not
had the opportunity to learn how to view art and its message, dumb
it down into a single, offensive, and sadly, myopic assertion.

Laura M. Young Fourth-year Art

Censors: burn books, not art

I am writing in response to Ben Shapiro’s column,
“Art
not always art in the eye of beholder, masses“
(Viewpoint, Feb. 11).

“The average person” is not the judge of whether a
work is art or not. Each person who views the artwork is a judge
and they are entitled to their own perspective and opinion. Just
because Shapiro or people who think like him view a series of
photographs as disturbing does not mean they are disturbing to
everyone.

People who think they can impose their opinions of morality on
the masses should stick to burning books and figuring out which one
of the Teletubbies might be gay. Their fascist censorship is
unwanted in the world of creativity and free expression.

David Burke Third-year Political science and
English