Sensitivities about the portrayal of children have caused ructions, reports Nick O'Malley.
A CHARITY exhibition at Sydney Children's Hospital of works by some of Australia's leading artists has collapsed after hospital officials saw one of the works - a photograph by the Archibald Prize winner Del Kathryn Barton - in which her six-year-old son is shown naked from the waist up.
The decision will cost the hospital an estimated $200,000. The exhibition, organised by the art adviser and broker Virginia Wilson Art, will go ahead in March and the proceeds will be donated to another charity, Midnight Basketball, which runs workshops and tournaments for youth who are at risk.
Ms Wilson said her board and the Sydney Children's Hospital Foundation had decided to part company a month ago, leaving her to find a new charity to support, even though the artists had agreed to create work to raise money for the hospital. But she said the decision was mutual and amicable.
Another organiser, Patrick Joyce, a prominent figure in Sydney media circles and an alternate director on the board of Fairfax Media, the publisher of the Herald, said he did not anticipate the concerns when he began work on the project a year ago, but he still defended the foundation. He said that when some of the first works arrived it became clear they might not comply with the hospital's strict rules for the use of images of children. Those rules would have to be applied even for an off-site exhibition linked to the hospital, he said.
A decision was made to find another charity to support, ''to preserve the artistic integrity of the exhitition''.
Mr Joyce said it was difficult to estimate how much the exhibition would raise because the artists had been commissioned to work outside their normal media - painters had sculpted or taken photos, sculptors had tackled painting. But he said that given the calibre of the artists who had agreed to take part, he expected about $200,000 could be raised. ''It is an amazing line-up. We got pretty well everyone on our hit list,'' Mr Joyce said.
The foundation's chief executive, Adam Check, was unavailable for comment yesterday and Barton could not be contacted.
Tamara Winikoff, the executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts, said decisions such as this were ''absurd and tragic''. She said that since the Henson scandal, when photographs of youths and children by Bill Henson, one of Australia's most famous artists, prompted media outrage and a police investigation, authorities were scared to associate themselves with any images of children.
''In our zeal to protect children we are erasing them entirely,'' she said. She said nudity was being conflated with pornography, even though representations of nudity had been part of Australia's artistic tradition throughout history.
The Henson scandal came after similar incidents during the previous two decades in the US where groups - often Christian - attacked artworks, which prompted failed police actions. An early Henson exhibition was targeted in Denver shortly after a Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective was closed. A decade later groups were still calling for bookshops to dump books of these artists' works.
One of the prominent painters whose work will be included, Ben Quilty, said Ms Wilson had notified him about the change of charities but he was happy to stick with the project, in part because of her reputation among artists. Other artists whose work will appear in the exhibition, Out of the Comfort Zone, include Michael Zavros, Nell, Lionel Bawden, Emily Floyd, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Sam Leach, Tim Maguire and McLean Edwards.
Subject: Is Nudity Pornography??? Read this Sydney Morning Herald Article!! 
Tue Feb 08, 2011 11:32 am
