Statue of David - great art

I had three little brothers, so I might have giggled at it as a little kid, but would not have been shocked or traumatized. It is beautiful art and important for kids to know about. That being said, I think there are things shown to kids nowadays that are way beyond healthy limits, but David is not one of them.
 

You did not upset or offend me in any way, @Mike. It is always curious to me why folks from other foreign countries lump us together in views and perspectives of life. Americans realize not all Europeans, Africans, Asians are of the same mind about customs and cultures.
Thank goodness we are open minded. Perhaps that's because we have learned from the older generations?
 
Right Now said:
It is always curious to me why folks from other foreign countries lump us together in views and perspectives of life.
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In my international travels I found that very often to be the case, but not always.

I think its the result of what the media reports, and those tend to be outlier, less common events. Like this one. They make the news, but all the places where no one is criticized for showing students such pictures are are not. Leads folks not here to think these things are more common than they are.

Still I do believe we have a more vocal, and possibly larger, minority who try to push their moral beliefs onto others than many western (and probably other) countries. Some times they are successful.
 

That we are even having this conversation is regressive and dysfunctional. We are heading to dangerous times if this is still a topic to be considered. We don't have the guts anymore to put down ignorance.

The Dark Ages were brighter. I mourn, truly, to live in a society where some are bringing us backwards and it is being allowed and welcomed as a possibility.

Tired of pandering to dopes; tired of pandering to the idea that everyone's idiocies are worthy, not of discussion, who cares, but given the authority to influence. Enough, I say, enough.
 
Alligatorob said:
I don't know, its been a while since we burned any witches.
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In fact they burned most of the witches after the Middle Ages. In Germany it was in the 16th and 17th century!
"There were trials in the 15th and early 16th centuries, but then the witch scare went into decline, before becoming a major issue again and peaking in the 17th century; particularly during the Thirty Years War." (from Wikipedia)
This period is called "Early Modern Europe"🤣.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch-hunt
 
fuzzybuddy said:
Considering that in Italy, multiple copies of David are in public squares, and of course the original is on public display in the Galleria Dell' Accademia, viewed by 1.6 million people/year. And the museum has no age restriction.
Somehow Italians have warded off being struck blind by seeing all of David.
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That calls for a class field trip to Italy!
 
Mike said:
I knew that I was writing this bit all wrong, Right Now, I was
meaning that, a small number of people in America, see things
the wrong way, I know that it doesn't apply to most of you and
I don't know enough about your country other than what I have
read and heard 2nd, 3rd or even 15th hand, the more people who
pass on a story, the more it changes, anyway somebody didn't like
the sculpture enough, to fire a Head Teacher, for showing it to some
children.

I apologise for upsetting you.

Mike.:cry:
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Mike, there are probably immigrated Londoners and Brits who wouldn't want their kid's to be flashed by the Statue of David at school, right?

The Puritans who settled in Plymouth back in the day now make up an extremely small minority in America. There are currently nearly 44 million immigrants living in the US and about half that many who applied for asylum or citizenship. Of the billions of people born here, about half are conservative in attitude and politics.

But again, I'm sure that school isn't anti-art, they just see a statue of a naked man. They're probably afraid of getting some parents upset, especially if that area is mostly religious.
 
We filled our Western culture with taboos about bodies. We're taught to view bodies as dirty, shameful, and imperfect. If we make an issue of showing nude artwork to students, we feed that troublesome narrative. That's teaching kids that their bodies are something to be ashamed of. If that's what's taught to children, then that's what it becomes.

Bodies are not offensive or disgusting. They are not only for s e x ual purposes. Bodies are beautiful. What the body is capable of is powerful and amazing. That's something that should be appreciated, if not admired.

When judging art, what constitutes pornography is rather subjective and dependent on context. Pornography illustrates se x ual situations designed to elicit sen sual pleasure, but it is not commonly regarded as erotic fine art. Some distinguish between se x uality in art and pornography based on the erotic artists’ objectives and statements. Erotic paintings are works designed for purposes other than just purely se x ual pleasure that may be admired as art by someone disinterested in their sen sual component.

We're not talking about sen sual artwork here, we're talking about Michelangelo's sculpture of David. Exploring the depictions of se x uality in art is a completely different subject.

And that's my nickel,

Bella ✌️
 
As a youth, I only saw images of Michelangelo’s David, and they were usually censored by fig leaves over David’s strategic parts. The statue was not erotic or sensual to me, and in my child’s mind, I mostly wondered how they got the fig leaves to stay on, and whether they were durable for wear. After all, I wore “tidy whities.”

What packed more of a punch for me was seeing Michelangelo’s Pieta in person at the 1964/65 World’s Fair in NYC. You were ushered past the statue on a moving sidewalk conveyance so people couldn’t linger. The statue practically glowed and seemed almost alive, and had quite an emotional impact…
 
I think, at some point in our tender youth, we all snuck a peek at the medical books in the library to see what all the fuss was about. We survived, at least I did.

Apparently, there was quite an industry during Victorian times producing detachable fig leaves to cover statues' "jiggly parts". Of course, these are the same people who put little skirts on table and piano legs just because they were....well...."legs" and therefore to be hidden lest they drive the males into a sexual frenzy......
 

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