Archbishop of Sydney

Art and Pornography

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
1/6/2008

The human body can make for beautiful works of art, and physical beauty has always fascinated artists. This is partly because it is not given to everyone and passes quickly with age.

Physical beauty also takes us to the sacred fire of sex. Perhaps because we are surrounded with sexual images, we seem to find it difficult to draw the line between art and pornography.

Police in Sydney recently seized a series of photographs of children, produced by artist Bill Henson.

I don’t know Henson’s work, and I have not seen the photos in question. It is always difficult to talk about a particular incident when it might end up in the courts. But it is possible to offer a few generalised thoughts.

The sexualisation of children is currently the subject of a Senate inquiry. It is part of what some critics call “the pornification of culture”. It’s impossible to miss. It’s on billboards and posters in main streets advertising everything from clothes and underwear to brothels, condoms, and treatments for impotence.

Supermarkets now stock soft-porn magazines, and some variety stores, incredibly, sell sex toys along with toys for kids. Magazines aimed at girls as young as 12 provide instructions on how to perform different sexual acts. And on the internet, children can easily end up at porn sites searching for their favourite cartoon characters.

All this is bad for children. It robs them of their childhood and brings the dark side of the adult world into their lives well before they are able to deal with it. It can lead to a first experience of sex at a very early age, and can lock children into bad and destructive habits before they are adult enough to make their own choices.

We have got used to treating too many things as “normal” in the area of sexuality. Thankfully the public revulsion at sexual activity between adults and children is still strong, but it is also under pressure from some quarters.

Like all of us, artists have to work within the law. Artists think their job is to continually push the boundaries, and expect to be rewarded and celebrated for doing so. In the nineteenth century, when pushing the boundaries was a new idea, artists didn’t have it so easy.

But society needs boundaries. Without them it is very easy to return to a world like ancient Rome’s, where nothing was prohibited sexually and the strong dominated the weak.

The Director of the Art Gallery of NSW says that Henson’s photos “are veritable symphonies of decadence and beauty, of squalor and opulence, of mysterious darkness and ominous light”.

I don’t know if he means this as a criticism, but if it is an accurate description of what the photos are about naked 12 year old children should not be a part of it.