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Jury Decides Artist's Gory Images On Website Are Art
New submitter wilbrod writes "A Quebec special effects artist charged with corrupting morals has been found not guilty in a case that tested the boundaries of creative expression and Canadian obscenity laws. He was charged with three counts of corrupting morals by distributing, possessing and producing obscene material. During the trial, Couture argued his gory works, roughly a thousand images and two short videos that appeared on Couture's website, Inner Depravity, should be considered art. The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia — all with young female victims."
Good thing he didn't get dragged to the US for an obscenity trial
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
His work was in line with movies like Saw.
While clearly not for everyone, it was indeed art.
Hopefully, his career as a makeup artist will pick up even more steam and will allow to recover his legal costs quickly.
And don't forget about watching all those Christians. They seem obsessed about the virtue of people dying on crosses and thereby absolving them of their sins. We wouldn't want them to decide to wash away some more sins.
Why do we even have obscenity laws? They're so incredibly ambiguous and wrong that they shouldn't exist to begin with. No, asshole, you don't and cannot "know it when you see it."
He was considering a series with male models but his career took off (he works in the television industry now) and he simply didn't have the time to follow-up
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
is not to give publicity to these attention whores.
I submitted this story yesterday.
It's really frustrating that it's still on roughly the first page of the "submissions" page, but a "dupe" was accepted.
Note, I don't bear any ill feelings towards user "wilbrod" for also submitting it, it's just that I feel I wasted my time bothering to. And it isn't the first time this has happened. And, IMHO, my submission was a bit lengthier and contained a bit more relevant info for the Slashdot crowd.
And, since I'm on a caffeine deficient rant-binge, where the hell are my mod points? I comment, submit stories, rate the submissions of others (to help relieve the deluge of spam, etc.), and not a single mod point in months and months, whereas before that I was getting 15 at a time(!) and they reappeared almost as soon as I used them up (sometimes even before).
*off to get some coffee and food into me*
And "victims" is used in the sense of "models wearing makeup".
If you take this guty to court, how about all the Saw/Hostel/etc.; all the dozens of slasher/splatter movies made every year? See, e.g. http://bloody-disgusting.com/
Distasteful is not criminal.Dressing up is not crime.
The material in question depicts gruesome murders, torture, sexual abuse, assaults and necrophilia â" all with young female victims.
"Art" perhaps. But I'd keep an eye on this guy. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with this sort of thing have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their entertainment.
"Opinion" perhaps. But I'd like someone to keep an eye on you. Of course it's only my reactionary opinion, but I think people that have an obsession with being concerned with what people do that doesn't harm anyone have a problem, and I'd want to make sure they don't "jump" to exercising a more "real world" form of their philosophy, like lobbying for laws that remove more of our freedoms.
You and I may find it disgusting, but that just means we don't need to go look at it. It doesn't mean this guy is going to go and hurt anyone, and I think it's dangerous for us to start assuming that anyone with a fantasy would want that fantasy to be reality. Let's look at less extreme forms of entertainment. I love James Bond movies. Would I really want to be James Bond? Let's see what happens when we turn that fantasy into reality. We have a man who constantly gets beaten up and tortured, constantly in danger of dying, and although getting laid like he does sounds great, think about all the STDs he must have. I'm a fan of Batman, but do you think that means that I would really want to see a vigilante out in the streets bypassing the court system?
Just because you enjoy a fantasy, doesn't mean you'd like to make it real.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
So all the splatter horror movie creators and viewers? Just how many people are you planning on keeping an eye on?
I've never seen the art, I don't plan to see the art, and I don't care what it's about. It could have been anything. It could have been stock footage of pebbles of gravel for all I care (can't say that 'I couldn't care less if it was horribly violent looking', since that's evidently what it was... so a different example appears to be required)
But the fact that it's allowed makes me smile just a little bit at Canada (which has been getting pretty hard for me lately, with Harper destroying the shit out of this place).
Freedom of speech today just took slightly less of a beating than it's normally been getting. Mind you it's still getting beaten within an inch of its life... but being beaten within an inch of its life with softer gloves this time.
Isn't the fact that his site is called "Inner Depravity" enough of a warning? I think you could make a pretty good argument that the "norms" that should be used to judge such a site should include only those people who would go to a site after seeing that name.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
you failed to grasp the meaning of TFAFalcon's sarcastic comment. Consider Mel Gibson's "The Passion." Goriest, most horrifying move I've seen in a long time. A real sickfest if you ask me. It's one thing to commemorate the death of Jesus. It's quite another thing to make dwell on every sick, sadistic detail of his crucifixion. But it's considered art and it should be. If we were banning 'art' on the basis of how horrific it is, we'd have to ban that movie and countless others, along with crucifixes and many other kinds of religious art and that would be a loss.
I guess I'm still kind of ok with it. I'm just worried about the people who are drawn to this site.
Why does the porn nature change your opinion of it? Isn't gruesome murder pretty high on the intolerable scale already?
In the US our FCC makes sure that producers can show babies being killed on TV, but babies being made is strictly forbidden. One school of thought says that this is entirely consistent with training a population to be 'at peace' with continual war.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
When I was younger, sexually frustrated, and jaded by readily-accessible Internet pornography, I had lots of fantasies that were extremely violent. I wouldn't have acted on them then, and I wouldn't act on them now. I still have fantasies that would turn my gut if I ever found out that they happened in real life.
There are certain people who are able to differentiate between fantasy and reality, and determine that what works in one may not work well in the other. We call those people "well-adjusted".
Oh you mean the US.
It's nigh impossible to get an accurate count of the number of criminal laws on the books.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Morally, yes, legally, no. Sadly, all the 5-12 year olds on The Gong Show (come on, is the "X" anything other than a gong?) is illegal child porn, according to many laws. It's just that the laws are so far divorced from reality that most wouldn't realize it unless they stopped and thought "would this excite a pedophile?" Though the general legal standard is "would this excite a normal person" but that is ignored in court, and it's all a question of "if you thought this was sexy, do you find this sexy?" So, by definition, anyone charged with child porn is guilty. Like the manga guy with so many movies that some of them included tentacle porn. He pled guilty because his lawyer let him in on the secret that anyone charged with child porn is guilty, even if the porn is fictional and completely impossible (tentacle porn). That it is part of a larger art collection is irrelevant.
The laws are so far divorced from reality it's insane. The problem is nobody wants to be seen as legalizing child porn, so they will only get more strict, and never less.
Learn to love Alaska
Elsewhere in the world, specificly The People's Republic of New Jersey, school officials cannot determine the difference between a real, and drawn automatic weapon. (wonder why the US has education problems)
Its good to see at least somewhere(Canada), the Enlightenment lives on, and people can continue to release that drawings don't come to life and hurt people.
Why don't you put him on a "list"
The "don't fly list"
The "sex offender list"
The "eats toejam and writes Free software list"
The (Charlie Sheen) "Winning" list
just to add to the previous "Security" and "Reserve" lists of US citizens that were actively spied on, for unspecified "crimes against the state" to be rounded up in case of an emergency.
What if my art is peeing in a jar containing a portrait of Stephen Harper? Surely I should be jailed if I offend enough people, eh? What if I paint a picture of the top 50 Canadian Industrialists crucified? If I offend you with such a painting I should be jailed, what? How about if I'm a journalist and I uncover atrocities committed in third world countries by those same industrialists and I then sell the rights to those news articles to said artist who commences a mural depicting those atrocities and they offend you? Surely I should be jailed for 50 years, yes?
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Ultimate sacrifice? Wasn't the death of every other person that died on a cross a much bigger sacrifice? After all, they didn't come back from the dead.
But the point of my comment was why persecute people creating images of torture, when the dominant religion in the country uses an implement of torture as it's symbol, and was founded on a person who had himself tortured to death. If creation of images of torture imply a desire to go on a killing spree then why restrict ourselves to 'keeping any eye on' just this artist? Shouldn't all the makers of crucifixes also be considered a danger? Shouldn't people who buy them?
The "ultimate" sacrifice? Jesus had a bad weekend for your sins.
Some of it even suggests that over time there is a need for kinkier pornography because the normal stuff no longer has as much of a dopamine release as it once did.
No, it doesn't. What is known is that the same sex act releases decreasing levels. The seven year itch and other phenomina like that are due to that effect. And no, a schedule of increasingly kinkier sex acts will not fix that. The variety changing is what causes the dopamine levels to get back to normal. But, rather than researching how to keep high dompamine levels with "mainstream" porn, the researchers are paid to demonstrate that porn is bad and leads to bad things. It's the purityranical core of the US creeping out again. First, prove it's bad, second ban it. It doesn't matter if the initial proof is wrong or all lies. Once it's banned, it stays banned. Marijuana is still illegal, being banned for racist reasons by money from the textile industry and big pharma.
Porn harms no one. If people stopped trying to prove how bad it is, and instead focused on making it as "safe" as possible, we'd have no problems. But instead, people try to make it as bad as possible, in practice as well as theory.
Learn to love Alaska
That he won a special effects Oscar for Saw XXIII.5?
Mmm. You may have been watching too many movies. Just a thought, but in terms of classical psychoanalysis, couldn't de-repressing these sort of fantasies in the form of art actually be a safety valve, just as horror movies allow the public to safely blow off their unconscious sadosexual fantasies? In other words, he might be less likely to act on them than some severely repressed, puritanical accountant who one day pops his cork ....?
Than you are a sick indevidual.
Well, I don't really feel terribly insulted when a person who can't even spell "individual" and "then" properly calls me sick.
I got the wrong thread. Merry Christmas, everyone!
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The 'point' of all the horrible gore in "The Passion" was to elicit pity and horror in the viewer, and to make them understand the sacrifice that was being made for Humanity's benefit.
Surely the 'point' had absolutely nothing to do with making a controversial movie even more controversial in an attempt to get more people to see it (read: make more money).
And surely a militant antisemite like Mel Gibson would never, ever, make this movie gory specifically to incite anger/hate against Jews, who are blamed for the crucifixion.
That reflects my thoughts as I was searching for a Christmas gift in a jewelry store yesterday. There were all these little gold and silver, jewel encrusted crosses in the store. I was thinking how peculiar anyone living at the time of Christ would have thought these little torture instruments. Had they peered into the future and seen these they might have concluded that it was the Romans we were holding in reverence. Also, I thought it was an interesting contrast, the expensive jewelry with a Christian symbol with pronouncements about the fate of the wealthy, "a rope through the eye of a needle" and so forth.
You're the only other person apart from myself I've known to state that it wasn't such a big sacrifice after all. Congrats and thankyou.
It'd be a far bigger sacrifice to give up for one's place in heaven to go to hell eternally. And that's something even I'd consider if I could save say 5 people, and consign myself for torture forever.
And that, if nothing else, is why I consider Christianity as pure garbage unfortunately.
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The outside world doesn't know it but we Canadians are actually legally required to be nice. Eh! Ya didn' think we were nice because we liked you?
All the puritans clearly think violence is absolutely fine while anything vaguely sexual will ruin the nation's morals, if it had any. This in a country (the US) with an enormous sex industry and where minors are routinely depicted as sexual beings in the fashion and advertising industries and in beauty competitions.
I find the hypocrisy simply astonishing. For the life of me I cannot understand how everyone doesn't see this. Are they all blind?
All those so-called Christians out there should remember: the only thing that ever made that Jesus of Nazareth totally lose his cool was *hypocrisy*. He despised hypocrites more than anything else. He much preferred socially-reviled sinners who were up front about it: prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, persecutors ... If he were here today he would be hanging with pedophiles and Ponzi scheme administrators for example.
So what does reading Mills and Boon, which is unadulterated romance-"porn", do to women?
But it's hard to define 'consensual' with children. If a parent/trusted adult tells a young child that something is good, the child will likely trust him/her and do it. So for example a girl could agree to have her genitals mutilated, since it would make look 'pretty'. Would that be considered consensual?
The 'legal age' is a bit arbitrarily set, but there has to be some way to protect children until they are old enough and have enough information about what they are consenting to.
It seems natural, at least to some, to recoil in horror at the notion of fantasizing about homicide or mass homicide. I am reminded of a scene from Inglourious Basterds
Spoiler Alert
Near the end of the film, it shows Hitler and a bunch of Reich VIPs watching a movie of the death camps and laughing, and we, the audience, are meant to recoil in horror (and we do). In the very next scene, the heroes slaughter Hitler and the VIPs and Tarantino frames it as a comic scene, and it made me laugh at the slaughter.
So there I was, whipsawed from moral outrage at someone for laughing at mass homicide on film to laughing at mass homicide on film in a matter of seconds. Now, obviously, we all prefer to see Hitler & Friends killed than innocent victims of genocide, but the laughing at mass homicide switchback remains. And it was all happening within a work of cinematic art.
Tarantino shot a scene of people laughing at holocaust victims, and it is art. He shot a scene that causes us to laugh at mass homicide, and it is art. He juxtaposes those scenes, and it is poignant, incisive art. If we can laugh at mass homicide, and see laughing at the holocaust as art, it would be very challenging to objectively define the moral limits of art.
Horrible things are a part of the human condition. If we are to be free to know ourselves, our artists must be free to explore the darkest corners of our beings.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Damn right they weren't of equivalent value.
The others died, uncertain about what, if anything, awaited them.
Jesus chose to let himself be crucified, then rose from the dead and went on living, effectively giving up nothing.
It's like honoring a person for a charitable donation, even after he canceled the check.
Let me get this straight. You're saying that the torture depicted by Couture will give sick freaks a hard-on, but the torture depicted in Passion won't, and this is only because Mel Gibson's heart is pure, and Couture's isn't?
Do you think I just fell off a potato truck, or what?
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
You missed the point (whether intentionally or out of ignorance, I leave to the reader):
It isn't what something will do, but why it was made:
* "Couture" designed his movies specifically to give sick freaks a hard-on. Nothing more, nothing otherwise. I defy anyone to prove otherwise.
* Passion of The Christ was designed to be an un-filtered look at what Christ had to go through, and was engineered to emphasize the suffering and the resurrection, so that adherants (and potential adherants) would empathize with Christ, and know what He went through on your spiritual behalf. Whether you do appreciate/empathize or not is up to you, but that is the intent, as originally written in a ~2000-year-old story.
There's a big diff there. You cannot dismiss intent, either - otherwise you end up equating Renaissance artwork with a typical pr0n mag. Yeah they both have naked people, but only one of the two was designed to generate hard-ons. Used to be that it was a mark of mental maturity to know and appreciate the difference; I hope things haven't changed by too much by now.
As for TFA? This "Couture" guy may be a sick freak, but legally, he has the perfect right to portray whatever he wants within the bounds of Canadian speech laws. Since Canada isn't the US, shouting "First Amendment!!!11!!" won't apply.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Well, I don't really feel terribly insulted when a person who can't even spell "individual" and "then" properly calls me sick.
And an elitist spelling Nazi to boot! My guess is that you have a thing for pedophilia and necrophilia involving female pre-teens. Wow, are you a sick puppy. But I guess this is what comes from a 35 year old overweight Neck Beard like you spending all your time in your mom's basement wearing your dead sisters panties while looking at Japanese Tentacle Porn.
Sick. Simply sick. Seek help before it's too late.
Oooh. Transference. Better discuss this with your shrink. Things are getting serious. I sense an epiphany!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You'd have to look pretty hard - crucifixion makes for a very slow and grisly death and was generally used to make an example of dangerous troublemakers by the powers that be, Jesus was hardly the first man to be thus killed. Basically you're restrained until you die of dehydration, which is a pretty bad way to go to begin with. To make matters worse any movement grinds the nails into your wounds so, unlike being shackled against a wall, you're going to have to be in pretty bad shape before you can lose consciousness, and you'll likely be constantly fighting to take the weight off the nails in your hands to reduce the pain, which will help keep you psychologically present and cause pain in your shoulders and back (try holding your arms straight out from your sides for even ten minutes, we're really not built to be able to do that). Meanwhile infection is burning its way in from the nail wounds, and you probably have a vicious sunburn after the first day or two, covering much of your body if you were partially stripped (if you've never had a sunburn so bad it turns purple you don't begin to understand how painful a sunburn can be). Night would give you respite from the sun, but in a desert you're then faced with rapidly falling temperatures which will become their own torture long before morning. If you're lucky it's over in a few days... if you're particularly hardy or are cursed with sympathetic guards/observers who sneak you water... well then he torture could last for weeks. Admittedly a more active torture likely hit higher peaks of pain, but it's also likely to be over *far* more quickly.
Still - we're talking about the purported Son of God here. It would seem only reasonable to assume that he could achieve the mental discipline separation of sensation and consciousness that permits a Buddhist master to calmly burn to death. Hell was presumably worse if you listen to the fire and brimstone sorts, or even just the absence of the light of God types (I believe hewas supposed to have spent his life up to that point ever-conscious of his tie to God, having that cut off could be a severe shock), but I still seem to recall that the story says he went in knowing it would be a brief visit, hardly seems like the ultimate sacrifice to me
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Perhaps you're not bothered, but many Christians really go OTT on that crucifixion thing. Calling it the "ultimate sacrifice" etc.
Moreover, hell is something I think relatively few really think about. I think getting Christians to think about their "wonderful time" in heaven whilst others roast in hell is a good thought exercise which can help them to be a bit more humble, and (shock), even question their beliefs, and the inconsistencies therein.
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And to people that are into that shit they are BOTH torture porn, end of story. nobody gives a rat's ass about "intent" because if that's all the excuse you need there are plenty of sick shit in both the bible and the koran that i can start filming tomorrow that will be sicker than anything yet put to film, so just get over it.
Free speech is free speech, either you have it or you don't, and if you think because it was written ages ago gives it a pass? Well plenty of writings equally old that can let me make movies that will make Schizophreniac 2 look like an episode of the Teletubbies.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Are the risks of mixing violence and religion any less severe? What about violence and politics?
Put innerdepravity.com into google then click images, Remy is actually quite good at his craft.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm curious. Have you ever had an infected dick?
I ask only because nobody mutilated me, and I've never had one. Never. Not "not on a regular basis" but never.
As opposed to the mutilated children, assaulted with no possibility of consent, a high proportion of whom need medical assistance as a result.
e.g. http://jpubhealth.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/280.abstract
I don't care where in the west you are free speech should be considered one of the most basic of human rights and if you don't have it? Well then frankly you simply don't have a free society, end of story. The way those in the EU persecute those that dare speak out about the Koran would make me label those societies as non free regimes, which is why we should ALL stand up when anyone in the west tries to stifle free speech.
Never forget the words of the Great John F. Kennedy "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." and at the core of everything is free speech, if you don't have it then frankly everything else really isn't worth anything.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.