Removing Lennon Photo From Exhibit a Huge Mistake

In response to the removal of the Annie Leibovitz photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono from the show at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center’s “Heroes, Heroines, Idols and Icons” exhibition, I can only call this simply a wrong action .

Why a photograph that ran as a cover of a national magazine nearly 10 years ago (Rolling Stone, Jan. 22, 1981) should disturb a community in progressive California now is a puzzle to most rational people who live in Orange County. This we might expect from the American Family Assn. of Mississippi, Jesse Helms or Dana Rohrabacher--but not the people of Fullerton. Why should this photograph now find its way into the headlines as a work deemed “inappropriate” to the show’s theme. Could it be political figures are now running scared in the wake of a few loud, ignorant people screaming for artistic censorship by the “taxpayers?” Are we now to expect art exhibits curated by committee--a committee of self-righteous fundamentalists who would leave us to believe that only works of upstanding Christians like Leroy Neiman and his ilk have valid messages. Why not change the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. It includes at least 19 penises on nude male figures.

It is important to keep a perspective on the propaganda employed by these groups and draw the line right here on our doorsteps. This is the same kind of technique employed by Adolf Hitler to burn books deemed “inappropriate” by a small vocal Nazi party by leading the masses to assume the country’s problems are somehow rooted to a morally decadent elite, in Hitler’s case the Jews and the homosexuals. In our current case it’s the art community. There is more here than bare buttocks in a photo by Annie Leibovitz. It is wrong action .

Am I to believe Fullerton community services superintendent Wes Morgan when he says this has nothing to do with the temper of the times? He says the curated work must go because “certain people didn’t think it was in keeping with the theme of the show.” He added, “It has nothing to do with censorship, nudity, John Lennon or Yoko Ono.”

Then what is it about? It is about these precisely, because I don’t believe there is a person alive today over 10 years old who won’t confirm that John Lennon was, if nothing else, an idol in his time and one of the most worshipped pop musicians of any time. This former Beatle was a most heroic individual. His message of love, freedom and right action was unpopular in his time. I had believed we were past that. To conclude that a portrait of John Lennon does not fit into a theme of heroes and idols seems like an extreme rationalization, to say the least.

It is wrong action.

MARK MOORE, Moore is the director of The Works Gallery in Costa Mesa, which withdrew photos it had loaned to the Muckenthaler after the Lennon photo was removed.