Thursday, 30 August 2012



The Punk-Test Of Liberty’s Limits

Duly Noted
Not every vulgarity is art, and not every publicly performed perversion is political protest.
Can one handle fish and not smell? Is it possible to spread honey without becoming sticky? Could “Pussy Riot” be discussed and not stoop to their level of lewdness? Such thoughts arise as one sets out to discuss a story behind the news that was.
Here the essentials, in case you missed the matter. “Pussy Riot” (PR) is a once ignored Russian female punk-rock band. It has a record of public sex acts, ranging from simple copulation to the vaginal insertion of a chicken in a supermarket. To “express itself” through an act of “art”, in Moscow PR invaded the cathedral of “Christ the Savior” to stage a political “action”. The analogy is to invade the Vatican. A show was put on. It asked the Virgin Mary – she herself has been told to switch to feminism- to remove Putin. The label: “a punk prayer”. The mischief scored in the internet. After less than a minute, the exhibition that revealed all including the panties of the artists was stopped. Arrests and then a trial followed. The verdict of two years, out of a possible seven, has shocked the foreign media. Count on copycat imitators emerging.