Art murdered

Cimitero di Staglieno - Tomba Famiglia Appiani
Cimitero di Staglieno – Tomba Famiglia Appiani

Poets and Lovers exists since five years and a half. It is now the sole survivor of a group of four related sites. Those devoted to the artist Graham Ovenden and his Garage Press have definitively disappeared: Graham died on 9 December 2022, then nobody was responsible for maintaining these two sites, and after the person in charge of the technical management of the four sites disappeared, their domain names were not renewed. The domain name of Pigtails in Paint was also not renewed: according to a press release dated 9 March on its Facebook page, when the person in charge had gone, the Editor-In-Chief could not get complete access to the domain name, so the latter expired. He decided then to let the project sleep until he could get help from other people. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

New flight

Gustave Moreau - La Péri: Rêve d'Orient
Gustave Moreau – La Péri: Rêve d’Orient (c1881) – from Art Renewal Center

Poets and Lovers lives since three years and a half, regularly facing threats. Our Internet provider had registered the domains of his sites with the domain registrar Njalla. On April 20, without any warning or explanation, Njalla decided to block the domain names of of all sites hosted by our provider, in particular Pigtails in Paint, Poets and Lovers and the sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press. Moreover, Njalla blocked our provider’s access to the virtual server that they hosted for his sites, they did not even allow him to download the latest contents before terminating it. The pretext was a supposed complaint against the contents of Pigtails in Paint, about which we have no details. After requests for information by our provider, they claimed “child porn,” then later “sexual objectification of kids.” They told him that he was “free” to move the domains to another registrar, but for several days, they refused to transmit him the authorisation codes for transferring the domains to another registrar. After a few days, Pigtails in Paint got its codes for registering the domain name with another company, but for Poets and Lovers it took a month to get the correct codes. The sites of Graham Ovenden and Garage Press had to change their domain names. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Censorship of nude art: greed and lust for power in the name of child protection

Removal of photographs of works by Duchamp, Michelangelo and Caravaggio from an exhibition
Removal of photographs of works by Duchamp, Michelangelo and Caravaggio from an exhibition – from Newcastle Herald (1984)

What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognise the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?
— Michelangelo

In recent years, Pigtails in Paint suffered repeated attempts at censorship, and Poets and Lovers became a “collateral damage” of these attacks. Today I will discuss the first source of censorship, so-called “child protection” organisations. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Arisen

Napoleon Sarony - The Birth of Venus
Napoleon Sarony – The Birth of Venus (ca.1900) – from Erotische Fotografie 1890–1920

Poets and Lovers exists since three years, having been through many difficulties. One year ago, our host provider in the UK, after repeated persecution by the police, was railroaded into a guilty plea (for possessing or having possessed material totally legal in any other country in Western Europe), then his server was forcibly closed down after a police raid. Fortunately, we soon found another host provider in another country. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

La nuit des monstres

Francisco Goya - El sueño de la razón produce monstruos
Francisco Goya – El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (Le sommeil de la raison produit des monstres), Los Caprichos No. 43 (1799) – Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons

Depuis deux ans et demi, la poésie de l’amour anime ce blog tué puis ressuscité, entouré de puissantes forces hostiles, mais soutenu par des amis dénués de pouvoir, souvent cachés. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Marvellous freedom

Dick Whittington - Children being taught at Ryan dancing academy, Southern California
Dick Whittington – Children being taught at Ryan dancing academy, Southern California (1933) – from historyinphotos.blogspot.com

After two years and a half, Poets and Lovers is alive and going on, surrounded by hostile forces. It survived the persecution of its first website provider by the UK police, which finally led to closing down the websites that he hosted. We have now a new provider, aiming to host several art websites suffering from censorship, starting with those suppressed in the UK: Poets and Lovers, Pigtails in Paint, and the sites of Graham Ovenden and of Garage Press. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…