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sweetchuck
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Didn’t know if anyone had seen this or not…
The fines are a slap on the wrist, but that’s FAR more than our lame courts would’ve done.
New York Times News Service
MOSCOW – A Russian court on Monday convicted a museum director and a curator of inciting religious hatred with an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that, to many, ridiculed the Russian Orthodox Church.
In a criminal case that tested the boundaries of artistic expression in Russia, the court ruled that the exhibition was “openly insulting and blasphemous.” It rejected the prosecutor’s appeal to sentence the two defendants to prison, however, and instead fined them the equivalent of $3,600 each.
The case against the exhibition, “Caution! Religion,” has deeply divided Russia’s religious and artistic groups since it opened briefly in January 2003. Monday’s verdict satisfied neither side entirely.
Yuri V. Samodurov, director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum, said he was relieved by the nature of the punishment, though not by the court’s ruling. He said the court’s verdict asserted the state’s power to dictate the limits of artistic expression. “In essence,” he said in a telephone interview, “the court declared a certain kind of art unacceptable.”
Alexander V. Chuyev, a member of the lower house of Parliament who played a role in pressing prosecutors to bring criminal charges against the museum, agreed that the verdict would set a precedent, but one he considered healthy.
He said the case had established the legal foundation for prosecutions relating to other exhibitions, as well as pornography, films and other works that offend the faithful.
The exhibition addressed spiritual and political aspects of the Orthodox Church, whose influence over politics, if not society generally, has grown since the Soviet Union collapsed.
One sculpture depicted a church made of vodka bottles, a biting allusion to the tax exemption the church received in the 1990s to sell alcohol. A poster by Alexander Kosolapov, a Russian-born American artist whose work often satirizes state symbols, depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement. “This is my blood,” it said in English.
The court refused a request by prosecutors to destroy the artworks, ordering that they be returned to the artists who created them.
The fines are a slap on the wrist, but that’s FAR more than our lame courts would’ve done.
New York Times News Service
MOSCOW – A Russian court on Monday convicted a museum director and a curator of inciting religious hatred with an exhibition of paintings and sculptures that, to many, ridiculed the Russian Orthodox Church.
In a criminal case that tested the boundaries of artistic expression in Russia, the court ruled that the exhibition was “openly insulting and blasphemous.” It rejected the prosecutor’s appeal to sentence the two defendants to prison, however, and instead fined them the equivalent of $3,600 each.
The case against the exhibition, “Caution! Religion,” has deeply divided Russia’s religious and artistic groups since it opened briefly in January 2003. Monday’s verdict satisfied neither side entirely.
Yuri V. Samodurov, director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum, said he was relieved by the nature of the punishment, though not by the court’s ruling. He said the court’s verdict asserted the state’s power to dictate the limits of artistic expression. “In essence,” he said in a telephone interview, “the court declared a certain kind of art unacceptable.”
Alexander V. Chuyev, a member of the lower house of Parliament who played a role in pressing prosecutors to bring criminal charges against the museum, agreed that the verdict would set a precedent, but one he considered healthy.
He said the case had established the legal foundation for prosecutions relating to other exhibitions, as well as pornography, films and other works that offend the faithful.
The exhibition addressed spiritual and political aspects of the Orthodox Church, whose influence over politics, if not society generally, has grown since the Soviet Union collapsed.
One sculpture depicted a church made of vodka bottles, a biting allusion to the tax exemption the church received in the 1990s to sell alcohol. A poster by Alexander Kosolapov, a Russian-born American artist whose work often satirizes state symbols, depicted Jesus on a Coca-Cola advertisement. “This is my blood,” it said in English.
The court refused a request by prosecutors to destroy the artworks, ordering that they be returned to the artists who created them.
