At the risk of seeing access to the Ministry blocked by several British ISP’s and maybe even getting arrested let me introduce you to  ‘Cupidon’ (aka ‘The Wet Cupid’) an 1875 painting in the classical/photorealistic style by the French Academic Painter William-Adophe Bouguereau:

I must admit that Bouguereau’s work is not really my ‘thing’ as art goes – my personal tastes run much more to the likes of Kilmt, Kandinsky and Surrealism/Dadaism but personal taste aside, the point of posting an image of Cupidon at the Ministry is to make the point that, if the Internet Watch Foundation’s unilateral decision to add a Wikipedia page containing a 30 year old album cover to its blacklist is anything go by, then it won’t be long before we find works of art like the one above becoming ‘off limits to British internet users.

In the sole and unaccountable opinion of the IWF, it would appear that the image that has become the bone of contention in this case, the original sleeve of a 1976 album called ‘Virgin Killer’ by German rock band, The Scorpions, has been classified as a ‘category 1′ piece of kiddie porn, of which the definition is “erotic posing with no sexual activity”, a description which could just as easily be applied to Cupidon, of which Bram Dijkstra, a retired Professor of English at the University of California (San Diego) wrote:

“No more sexually enticing adolescent could have been offered by the master, but unlike Oscar Wilde who was jaied after being prosecuted for pederasty, Bouguereau was given official accolades and honors”

All of which sounds very much as Dijkstra would agree that “erotic posing with no sexual activity” would be a fair description of the painting, even if, as a noted artwork on a classical theme there is little realistic prospect, one suspects, of the IWF coming down hard on Bouguereau’s painting. It’s amazing the difference that slapping a pair of wings on an image of a doe-eyed adolescent boy can make, but that’s art for you.

One angle that’s yet to emerge in media coverage of this story is the fact that this is not the first occasion that this particular image, and its appearance on Wikipedia, has drawn a measure of unwanted attention. In May of this year, the ultra-right wing ‘news website’, World Net Daily took a shot at stirring up trouble for Wikipedia over this particular image in the course of what looks to all the characteristics of a contrived ‘paedogeddon’ smear, one which started with a neat little piece of synthetic outrage regarding a Wiki article defining a ‘fluffer’ which includes an image which according to WND shows:

two nude men having anal sex on a bed, and a “fluffer” handing them a towel

Judging by the actual image, ‘having’ is entirely the wrong tense to use here, unless one of the two gentleman pictured is of such a prodigious length that he literally does have to strap his honourable member to knee in order walk with anything like a normal gait.

For days two and three, WND concentrated all their efforts on the ‘Virgin Killer’ sleeve, making the claim that the FBI were investigating Wikipedia over the image, although six months on, evidence of any kind of official ‘investigation’ or intervention, outside of the claims made in WND’s articles, has yet to materialise.

The existence of prior attempt, by a right-wing ultra-conservative internet ‘news’ site, to stir up trouble for Wikipedia over this image raises a legitimate question about the provence of the complaint received by the Internet Watch Foundation via its online reporting system. Did the complaint originate from a genuinely concerned individual, or is it a continuation of WND’s previous attack on Wikipedia by a member the American conservative right? At the very least, the IWF should disclose whether this complaint originated from within the UK or, as seems possible, from the US.

While there’s no question that the image, itself, is in very dubious taste, I can find nothing to suggest that it have ever been officially banned in the UK or made subject to any kind of legal proceedings, although it would come as no surprise to find that some of mainstream record store of the periods may have refused to the stock the album in its original cover. I can, for example, find no record of any arrests or prosecutions relating to the album under the Obscene Publications Act, even though the Act was wheeled out by the Obscene Publications Squad in 1982 in order to seize all copies of the Anti Nowhere League’s Streets of London EP due the presence of ‘So What?‘ on the b-side. Nor is there anything to suggest that there have been any prosecutions relating to the sleeze of ‘Virgin Killer’ under the Protection of Children Act 1978 which. although it came into effect two years after the release of the album, contains nothing by way of limitations relating to material that predates the Act that would rule out the possibility of such a prosecution.

In other words, this particular image has been kicking around for 32 years without seemingly ever spawning any kind of prosecution in the UK only for an unaccountable net nanny set up by ISPs after they were threatened by the Metropolitan Police, in 1996, with the possibility that one of them would be hauled before a court as a test case for providing access to Usenet newsgroups which contained what the police considered to be illegal content, to suddenly decide that the image amounts to kiddie porn – and what is most interesting about the IWF origins is that the Police’s argument, back in 1996, was that they considered the ISP to be the publishers of the material in question, an argument with distinct shades of the Brunswick libel ruling which has been little short of a plague on free speech in the UK since the Victorian era.

Whatever you think of the image itself – and personally I’m rather ambivalent towards it as I think context is very much an issue with images of this kind, in sense that its the kind of image that wouldn’t lead to a prosecution if shown in a gallery as part of a photographic art collection but might get Joe Soap nicked if it were found on his work’s PC – this matter does raise significant questions about the extent to which censorship of the internet is being privatised and placed in the hands of unaccountable and, often, unchallengable organisations like the IWF and ISPs at the direct behest of the police and/or the government.

It may have started with the IWF and child pornography, but having forced ISP’s to swallow that role, it seems to have become a matter of deliberately policy to push the monitoring and policing of the internet for all manner of other things, including copyright and, to a certain extent, libel onto ISPs where its diificult if not almost impossible for an individual to challenge a censorious decision without resorting to expensive civil litigation.