With Apple’s refusal to approve apps which display even a smidgen of nudity, I got to thinking about what kinds of images would get your app excluded from the sanitized and Disneyfied world of Apple. What about an app that promotes women’s health by instructing women on how to conduct a self-examination for breast cancer? Would instructional images fall foul of Apple’s standards?
Or what about religious images? What about the work of Michelangelo which adorns the Sistine Chapel? You know, the place where the Roman Catholic church’s cardinals meet to select the Pope? The place that’s decorated with all that filth and porn? If you look closely at the picture below, you’ll notice that Adam’s starting to get a hard-on.
I can understanding banning an image like this 1547 engraving by Sebald Beham. It portrays Judith with the head of Holofernes. Nudity and violence together in the same image! May God protect my eyes.
Or what about images of gallantry, like John Everett Millais’ The Knight Errant who rescues the damsel in distress? Of course it’s obscene, but more for being a piece of romantic goo than for its nudity.
Or the portrayal of a simple act of romantic love? e.g. August Rodin’s The Kiss.
Or reclining nudes, like this one by Frans Koppelaar? Surely the mere sight of this would corrupt children and the dim-witted and would rend a permanent tear in the social fabric.
One of my fears is that the Apple standards represent the further spread of a chilling effect upon the organic process by which we engage questions around the nature of art, the relationship we have both to our bodies and more generally to the physical world, and they way in which our identity is wrapped up in matters of gender and sexuality. If we never skirt near the boundaries of this ongoing conversation, then the conversation proves largely useless. Take, for instance, this photo by Robert Mapplethorpe.
I don’t know about you, but I think the story of Apple’s newfound Victorian scruples is a Weird Tale.
Apple, get a life.