And… one more art musing from my recent wanders, before normal blog service resumes (whatever that is). This one hits the sweet spot of me being in my happy place, and me just asking the questions that I ask for a living. As I do.

Here was the brochure for a recent art exhibition I attended. Not that you could have missed it, because this poster was everywhere you looked in town. I even bought an art print of it.

That’s Nina Hagen and Ari Up, in 1981, obviously.

The title of the exhibition, Favourite Darkness, was a secret wink. Every lifelong DM fan doesn’t just know where the phrase comes from, we know what it means. Because every lifelong DM fan has spent decades illuminated, in the dark, by the deep artistic relationship between AC and DM. Like the title, and the lyric: we get it. 

So I went in and found myself in an entire massive Depeche room full of All The Things. I mean, all the things. I was like a kid on Christmas morning.

And I also found myself in a big dark freaking loud AC DM video room.

Reader, I died and went to heaven.

Being a career retrospective, there was a lot of DM AC imagery on display that brought back memories. Like this one, from 1989, of DG AF MG AW +1:

I walked out extremely happy and in possession of an AC art print of DG in his heroin era, which I’ve decided to frame, so that I can inform my visitors that it’s an image of Jesus suffering. That is absolutely how I roll.

But that’s not why I’ve committed this joy to a blog post, of course. I’ve written it to provoke the point with the two photos in this post. Photos from an art exhibition. Art for art’s sake. Art for provocation. Art which has been reproduced in many, many places since those two photographs were taken in the 1980s.

Does this make my blog ~not safe for children~ and a candidate for mandatory “age assurance” at my own expense?

Does this make my blog – my own personal and non-commercial home for talking to myself – fall under a new legal regime?

Does this make me some sort of smut peddler?

Does this mean it’s no longer safe to talk about your art, your music, your travels, your adventures, the people you love, the things you love?

Imagine what sort of person would think that the answer to all four provocations was yes.

Actually, you don’t have to wonder, because those kinds of people have won the day.

(As if the above imagery was the worst thing imaginable and let me tell you folks, do you know what this band put us through from 1994-1997? Do you?? Grow a thicker skin, people. Maybe a pair of balls. Or a pair of something else {as pictured above}. You’re useless. Useless. Use less.)