Jan 6, 2011

Del Kathryn Barton silly - New Sculpture finished




Finished this one, new one started, been fishing (didn't catch much), had a great Christmas, met up with old friends, life is pretty nice and then we get that silly story about Del Kathryn Barton's charity snap. And its got to me. No I'm not going to side with the art world on this one because its a complete beat up. It has nothing to do with censorship at all. No one seems to dare to say that these artists entered into agreement with someone to create works to raise money for the Sydney Children's Hospital, an organisation with a very well known policy about the depiction of children, which, of course, is perfectly reasonable. Then Barton purposely ignores this by producing an image of her half naked son covered in spots, and along with the organiser does a classic, "What me!"

At best you could call it downright stupid or naive, but of course she's not that silly, she would have known that there was a huge possibility of a bit a fuss. Artists seeking cheap publicity are getting too thick on the ground for my taste. Using a charity event for this is even lower because really the artist clearly isn't making any serious effort at all to genuinely raise money for the hospital.

There is only one straight forward and simple way for us artists to make money for the charities that we support and that is to give them a high quality examples of what we are best known for.

So thumbs down to Barton from me for being so mean spirited and even insulting towards the Children's Hospital by sending in an ordinary snap of a spotty kid instead of something she does really pretty well.

No one seems to have asked Del Kathryn Barton if she paid her son at the full advertising rate for modelling for this picture before the flack occured, if she didn't surely that constitutes a real exploitation of her own child.



image aquired from SMH with no obvious restictions like copyright