artspace issue:

Artspace has a spyphone...

by David LaRiviere

Screening calls is a lot like surfing the web or slugging back a delicious bubble tea in downtown Toronto: a relatively recent development. Unlike bubble tea (at least, to the best of my knowledge) screening telephone calls can pose certain moral/ethical problems. Recently I succumbed to an unthinking moment and quickly asked my co-worker Sekoiaa to tell a caller that I was not in Artspace. Immediately I felt like an idiot as I watched a person with an admirable degree of integrity squirm through a lie not of her own choosing. I apologized and promised never to do it again.

However, at times a spy phone can come in mighty handy. Earlier today I received a phone call from the Canadian Police Association, an unsolicited call that must be going out to hundreds if not thousands of businesses. The fellow on the other end asked to speak to Peg Towne or Andrea Fatona. After updating their database from 1998, the gentleman in question quickly introduced himself and moved onto the subject at hand. There was a tone of righteousness in his assumption that I am, of course, a concerned citizen who does not want to see harm come to the children of our community. In short, the call was a broad-based form of solicitation designed to gain support for the CPA's initiative to "stiffen child porn laws" and institute firmer sentences. His proposal was simple, you either side with those who would address the problem in unnamed punitive terms or you are complicit to operations that would see harm brought to children. I respectively inquired about details regarding what the CPA is proposing in terms of definitions around such hot topics as child porn, pornography in general, and the abuse of human rights. The caller then shifted tone to an even more aggressive tenor and asked me why I would even need or wish to know such background information. Of course, he is safe in his assumption that I oppose the infringement of human rights, however, as I explained, as an advocate for artist rights I am also concerned with how vague legal definitions can lead to a baffling of the very issues that his call is trying to address. I asked him if he was familiar with the case of Eli Langer, a Toronto-based artist whose oil on canvas paintings were seized from an exhibition at Mercer Union by the Toronto police department's "morality squad" on December 16, 1993. http://collections.ic.gc.ca/mercer/348.html In this instance a series of oil on canvas paintings, that is pigment suspended in a vehicle (usually linseed oil) spread across a cotton material and drawn from the artist's imagination, were somehow deemed to infringe on human rights. How can that be?

He hung up. However, artspace has a spy phone so I called him back.

…To be continued…