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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."
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."
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.
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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.
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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".
I'm not a Slashdot editor, but I'd say they picked this submission because it was a proper summary and didn't copy/paste sections of the original story in the submission like your one did.
Basically you put too much, and at the same time not enough, information in the summary. You grabbed sections from a coherent article and made a somewhat different article out of it. You think your information was relevant, but what a Slashdot summary is supposed to do is to push the core information in a couple of sentances and then send the reader to the link.
Your summary didn't give the historical background to the case, didn't give the charges laid against Couture or an indication of what the content was. That's what is needed in a summary. Sorry to be harsh, but your one was a mish-mash.
MOD POINTS, that I agree with you. Where are my mod points.
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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.
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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.
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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I find the 'Saw' movies disgusting and tedious. But I don't want them banned just because they're revolting bad movies. But I don't need them banned. Call me old fashioned, but I just don't watch them! Everyone has a choice, a point which seems to all elude the would-be censors of the world.
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.
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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?
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