Censorship and vanity

By Borja Bandrés

It turns out that Meta's new technical director, Andrew Bosworth, has been caught saying that he plans to institute "almost Disney-level safety standards" on the platform. A juicy and promising statement coming from a social network that, since its creation, pays daily homage to the most sublime priggish puritanism.

This work by Glauco Capozzoli, titled "El Grupo" (The Group) and part of our collection, was censored by Facebook. 

A custom of deep roots and profound tradition in History, the censorship of nudes in art is in the DNA of what was formerly called Facebook. A few years ago, it went so far as to label a thirty-thousand-year-old sculpture, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, as "pornographic," and as if this definitive decision wasn't clear enough, the platform rejected the appeals of the user who shared the photograph of this voluptuous stone-age woman not once, not twice, but four times. The incident had to reach the director of the Vienna Art Museum — owner of the work — for Facebook to deign, in its magnanimous generosity and exceptionally, to allow the publication because its use policy "does not allow nudity, not even suggested." An edifying policy that allows countless floozies, gigolos, prostitutes, actresses in R-rated movies, aspiring actresses, exhibitionists, and all those seeking immediate notoriety, to show bodies that leave little to the imagination.

"The Napalm Girl" a historical photograph that marked a before and after in the Vietnam War. 

Other notorious censorship milestones by the company and its subsidiary Instagram include the suppression of a publication of the statue of Neptune in the city of Bologna for considering it “sexually explicit” given that this god showed “too much of the body unnecessarily.” An opprobrium for Tommaso Laureti, the sculptor who five hundred years ago decided to sculpt intimate parts for Neptune instead of giving him a loincloth. Let's not forget either that Facebook labeled the iconic photograph of the Vietnamese girl fleeing naked and terrified from a napalm attack as “obscene.” A product, by the way, called Agent Orange and created by Monsanto, a company absorbed by a well-known pharmaceutical company that distinguished itself in Nazi extermination camps and shares shareholders with Meta. Although the list of milestones is endless, we will put a stop to it with the warning received by a Danish MP indicating that her publication of the Little Mermaid sculpture in Copenhagen was "too naked," because, get this, “the network must be a safe virtual place for visitors, including the many children who use it.”

Photographer Spencer Tunick stages one of his large-scale group nude sessions in New York, 2019.

However, this string of statements and ex cathedra decisions did not fall on deaf ears and began to accumulate a considerable number of complaints, protests, and petitions that became slightly annoying for the company. Therefore, in 2019, Facebook invited twenty very hopeful artists and curators to its New York headquarters to reconsider the social network's artistic policies. The results were not as encouraging given how countless publications, ads, and accounts continue to be censored, deleted, penalized, or made invisible in one fell swoop today. So much so that there are now websites that compile works removed from Meta. Furthermore, several galleries, artists, and museums, including the aforementioned Vienna Art Museum, have found no better idea than to migrate to platforms like Only Fans where one gets paid to show their privates and other less noble parts of the anatomy.

This work by Egon Schiele, along with those of other artists from Viennese museums, has been published on Only Fans due to Meta's censorship.

It is undeniable that Meta, but also LinkedIn, Twitter, and the other major social networks have changed the rules of the game, making it possible, as never before, to connect, gain global and instant visibility, access opportunities, and bypass the traditional hierarchy. For example, between galleries and artists, whereas before the former assumed significant economic and image risks by promoting talented and often emerging creators. And they have done so by imposing their own rules, which we have either accepted or simply ignored, prioritizing our eagerness and vanity to be seen and to achieve results that, just two decades ago, would have required years of work, if not seemed impossible. By acting in this way, we have voluntarily overlooked that the raison d'être of these companies is not to offer substance, transparency, or rigor, but to plunge us into an endless flow of content where anyone can publish practically anything at any time. And just as picking up a pencil doesn't make one a draftsman, making an exhibition by throwing sand on the street to reflect a great existential problem doesn't make one an artist, as we discussed in the article, artists, geniuses, and incompetents.

After all, the problem is not the censorship of historical works of art, nor even of beautiful and recent creations, but the tens of millions of stupidities published every second. Social networks are merely a mirror of society, whose reflection, in most cases, validates what the Franco-Belgian humorist Raymond Devos once said: "I have nothing to say, but I want it to be known."