George Condo is one of the best-known artists of contemporary art. He works in the media of painting and sculpture. He has exhibitions at the Whitney Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Guggenheim, New York; the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in Germany and most recently at the Wrong Gallery in the Tate Modern, London.
Condo’s art is more than what contemporary art lovers expect. It is provocative and it creates a moment of shock and a pensive approach. Condo may reflect for us the life of a tortured artist plagued by demonic visions.
Currently, most people know Condo as an artist whose artwork was censored rather than his tortured and violent and funny works. His work, which appeared on the cover of an album by Kanye West, a U.S. rapper, was censored. Condo’s work on the cover of the CD displays a hairy animal-like creature with bat ears and an armless woman-like monster with wings and a tail. Once again Condo reveals the dialectic between classic portraiture and Disneyland characters in a very dark way.
However, neither West’s album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” nor the high points that the album got from the music critiques did not help avoid the censorship of the album. It is banned from the shelves of Walmart and pixilated on iTunes to protect people from Condo’s characters’ erotic scene.
We also see censorship in art in Turkey. For example in 2008 Ayşegül Yarar’s nude paintings were censored in Gaziantep. The reason was the same, the aim was to protect people from the eroticism of the paintings. On the other hand, Taner Ceylan’s painting called 1879 (from his “Lost Painting Series”), which features significant eroticism, saw some censorship.
However, compared to West’s Condo cover those examples are different, because of the involvement of the music album. What is really wired is that in 1974 David Bowies’s Diamond Dogs cover was also censored because Belgian artist Guy Peelleart drew Bowie as a dog with genitals. After a while the genitals were removed. Peelaert’s painting style is uniquely photographic and special.
The fact is that when a censor gets involved in art, the pieces make more money or an artist’s website is visited by lots of people. Just like eroticism sells, censor also sells in art. It draws attention and makes people want to look at it more. So maybe, it might be fair to evaluate censorship as a positive thing for an artist and a negative thing for the viewers, as we all have the right to look at the paintings we want to, without encountering censorship.