Is Art for Adults Only?

The Scottish Gallery of Modern Art is restricting entrance to Tracey Emin's retrospective show to adults.

The exhibition will attract many people who would not usually think of ever going near a gallery. Along with the likes of Damien Hirst, Emin has become an icon, but her work is not simply about shocking the public: to consider only the sexual content of her art is to put too much emphasis on one aspect of her work.

So the gallery’s decision to warn all visitors to the exhibition, entitled 20 Years, that it contains work of an explicit nature and insist that anyone under the age of 16 be accompanied by an adult, is worrying. It sends a signal that viewers are only looking for the sexual messages that are built in to many of the works.

More and more in society censorship is becoming the choice when something even has the potential to be offensive to somebody. Such repression of truth and reality only leads to further ignorance and misunderstanding of the true nature of art. The censor is the pornographer.

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