This morning, ANIMAL staff collectively deliberated whether an artist’s self-portrait was appropriate for a lead image. Presumably, we overestimated the general public’s tolerance for side-boob.
We’re still following up on our story about a Chicago curator’s alleged “found art” exhibit of an “anonymous” artist, who we instantly recognized and proved to be the very non-anonymous Molly Soda. In fact, as I write this, the curator is finally answering our questions.
However, at some point today, someone — an enthusiastic vigilante or a troll with a personal vendetta — reported the lead image we posted on our Facebook page, the same lead image The Chicago Reader ran with their originally underreported story. Unlike The Chicago Reader, we even cropped out Molly Soda’s entire nude posterior for modesty’s sake, but alas… It was deemed in violation of Community Standards and removed. And now we’re banned from doing stuff on Facebook. UPDATE: Apparently, page access has been thankfully restored to some of our staff members after we deleted the offending item, but since I was the offending poster of very offensive pornographic pornography, I still don’t. See you on Twitter.
We were previously blocked for posting our photographs of paintings of screenshots of Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia‘s Venus Webcam as it was mounted at the Eyebeam Art+Technology’s F.A.T. artist collective’s 5-year retrospective. We had some great discussions about internet censorship as it directly related to the artists’ practice and we thought we had learned our lesson in navigating Facebook’s relatively puritanical Community Standards.
Facebook has a strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved. We also impose limitations on the display of nudity. We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo’s David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.
We’re not sure what “aspire to” means, but we really didn’t think that just a few tiny pixels behind a heavy filter of hued lighting in an identified digital-born artist’s early non-pornographic non-explicit portfolio would be a violation of the terms. Is it? Really?
Robert Mapplethorpe is not sorry, but I’m sorry. Can I please get back to work now?
