art

"[T]he list of requirements a film needs to receive a G rating was doubled, and there were no other acceptable ratings!"

"My first assignment, as a new art assistant, was to remove cleavages and lift up low cut blouses on Katy Keene."

"(6) Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested."

"His sometimes suggestive storytelling – and he was one of the best – almost cost him his job. When his pencilled stories came in, the characters were dressed on one page only. The inker, a woman by the name of terry Szenics, would have to clothe them on the remaining pages."

"(7) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden."

"(1) Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden."

"(4) Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."

"(2) Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities, are unacceptable."

"(7) Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals."

"So he said it can't be a Black [person]. So I said, 'For God's sakes, Judge Murphy, that's the whole point of the Goddamn story!' So he said, 'No, it can't be a Black'. Bill [Gaines] just called him up [later] and raised the roof, and finally they said, 'Well, you gotta take the perspiration off'. I had the stars glistening in the perspiration on his Black skin. Bill said, 'Fuck you', and he hung up."

"This really made 'em go bananas in the Code czar's office. 'Judge Murphy was off his nut. He was really out to get us', recalls [EC editor] Feldstein. 'I went in there with this story and Murphy says, "It can't be a Black man". But ... but that's the whole point of the story!' Feldstein sputtered. When Murphy continued to insist that the Black man had to go, Feldstein put it on the line. 'Listen', he told Murphy, 'you've been riding us and making it impossible to put out anything at all because you guys just want us out of business'. [Feldstein] reported the results of his audience with the czar to Gaines, who was furious [and] immediately picked up the phone and called Murphy. 'This is ridiculous!' he bellowed. 'I'm going to call a press conference on this. You have no grounds, no basis, to do this. I'll sue you'. Murphy made what he surely thought was a gracious concession. 'All right. Just take off the beads of sweat'. At that, Gaines and Feldstein both went ballistic. 'Fuck you!' they shouted into the telephone in unison. Murphy hung up on them, but the story ran in its original form."

"RINGGENBERG: Well, given that the Comics Code expressly forbid the use of the words Weird, Horror and Terror, did you feel that your company was being particularly targeted?"

"(4) Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader."

"(5) Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited."

"(1) Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure."

"(3) Policemen, judges, government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority."

"(2) If crime is depicted it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity."

"(5) Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation."

"I could understand them; they were like lawyers, people who take things literally and technically. The Code mentioned that you mustn't mention drugs and, according to their rules, they were right. So I didn't even get mad at them then. I said, 'Screw it' and just took the Code seal off for those three issues. Then we went back to the Code again. I never thought about the Code when I was writing a story, because basically I never wanted to do anything that was to my mind too violent or too sexy. I was aware that young people were reading these books, and had there not been a Code, I don't think that I would have done the stories any differently."

"(6) In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds."

"(1) Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals."

"(2) Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable."

"“Sympathy with a person who sins”, is not the same as sympathy with the sin or crime of which he is guilty. We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime; we may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done. The presentation of evil is often essential for art, or fiction, or drama. This in itself is not wrong, provided: (a) That evil is not presented alluringly. Even if later the evil is condemned or punished, it must not be allowed to appear so attractive that the emotions are drawn to desire or approve so strongly that later they forget the condemnation and remember only the apparent joy of the sin. (b) That thru out the presentation, evil and good are never confused and that evil is always recognized clearly as evil. (c) That in the end the audience feels that evil is wrong and good is right."

"Law, natural or divine, must not be belittled, ridiculed, nor must a sentiment be created against it. (A) The presentation of crimes against the law, human or divine, is often necessary for the carrying out of the plot. But the presentation must not throw sympathy with the criminal as against the law, nor with the crime as against those who must punish it. (B) The courts of the land should not be presented as unjust. III. As far as possible, life should not be misrepresented, at least not in such a way as to place in the minds of youth false values on life."

"In accordance with the general principles laid down: (1) No plot theme should definitely side with evil and against good. (2) Comedies and farces should not make fun of good, innocence, morality or justice. (3) No plot should be so constructed as to leave the question of right or wrong in doubt or fogged. (4) No plot should by its treatment throw sympathy of the audience with sin, crime, wrong-doing or evil. (5) No plot should present evil alluringly."

"Costume GENERAL PRINCIPLES (1) The effect of nudity or semi-nudity upon the normal man or woman, and much more upon the young person, has been honestly recognized by all law-makers and moralists. (2) Hence the fact that the nude or semi-nude body may be beautiful does not make its use in the films moral. For in addition to its beauty, the effect of the nude or semi-nude on the moral individual must be taken into consideration. <br (3) Nudity or semi-nudity used simply to put a “punch” into a picture comes under the head of immoral actions as treated above. It is immoral in its effect upon the average audience. (4) Nudity, or semi-nudity is sometimes apparently necessary for the plot. Nudity is never permitted. Semi-nudity may be permitted under conditions. PARTICULAR PRINCIPLES (1) The more intimate parts of the human body are the male and female organs and the breasts of a woman. (a) They should never be uncovered. (b) They should not be covered with transparent or translucent material. (c) They should not be clearly and unmistakably outlined by the garment."

"The motion picture has special Moral obligations: (A) Most arts appeal to the mature. This art appeals at once to every class-mature, immature, developed, undeveloped, law abiding, criminal. Music has its grades for different classes; so has literature and drama. This art of the motion picture, combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, at once reaches every class of society. (B) Because of the mobility of a film and the ease of picture distribution, and because of the possibility of duplicating positives in large quantities, this art reaches places unpenetrated by other forms of art."

"Psychologically, the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion."

"Mankind has always recognized the importance of entertainment and its value in rebuilding the bodies and souls of human beings. But it has always recognized that entertainment can be of a character either helpful or harmful to the human race, and, in consequence, has clearly distinguished between: Entertainment which tends to improve the race, or, at least, to recreate and rebuild human being exhausted with the realities of life; and Entertainment which tends to degrade human beings, or to lower their standards of life and living. Hence the moral importance of entertainment is something which has been universally recognized. It enters intimately into the lives of men and women and affects them closely; it occupies their minds and affections during leisure hours, and ultimately touches the whole of their lives. A man may be judged by his standard of entertainment as easily as the standard of his work. So correct entertainment raises the whole standard of a nation. Wrong entertainment lowers the whole living condition and moral ideals of a race."

"Vulgarity may be carefully distinguished from obscenity. Vulgarity is the treatment of low, disgusting, unpleasant subjects which decent society considers outlawed from normal conversation. Vulgarity in the motion pictures is limited in precisely the same way as in decent groups of men and women by the dictates of good taste and civilized usage, and by the effect of shock, scandal, and harm on those coming in contact with this vulgarity. (1) Oaths should never be used as a comedy element. Where required by the plot, the less offensive oaths may be permitted (2) Vulgar expressions come under the same treatment as vulgarity in general. Where women and children to see the film, vulgar expressions (and oaths) should be cut to the absolute essentials required by the situation. (3) The name of Jesus Christ should never be used except in reverence."

"No picture should lower the moral standards of those who see it. This is done: (a) When evil is made to appear attractive, and good is made to appear unattractive. (b) When the sympathy of the audience is thrown on the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil, sin. The same thing is true of a film that would throw sympathy against goodness, honor, innocence, purity, honesty."

"In July of 1934 an editorial in The Commonweal, a semi-official organ of the Catholic church, declared that the “muck merchants” of Hollywood, that “fortress of filth” that had been destroying the moral fiber of the American people, had finally been brought to its knees by the Catholic church and its Legion of Decency. In less than a year the church had recruited millions of Americans of all religious denominations to pledge not to attend “immoral” movies. With a national depression already threatening Hollywood’s financial stability, movie czar Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of American (MPPDA), accepted the terms of surrender dictated by the church and its legions. The truce struck between Hays and the Most Reverend John T. McNicholas, Archbishop of Cincinnnati, and written and negotiated by Martin Quigley, publisher of “The Motion Picture Herald”, signaled a turning point in a 30-year battle among religious leaders, women’s groups, civic organizations, municipal and state censorship boards, and the motion picture industry over the content of Hollywood films. The victory took the form of a new agency inside the MPPDA, the industry's trade association. The Catholics demanded that Hays create Production Code Administration (PCA) to enforce the censorship code adopted by the industry in 1930. The code, written by a Catholic priest, had not, in the opinion of the church, been enforced. The church demanded, and Hays agreed, that a staunch lay Catholic, namely Joseph I. Breen, would head the PCA and interpret the code. To guarantee that Breen would have enforcement powers, the agreement forced every studio to submit scripts to the PCA before production. The studios agreed that no production would begin without script approval and that no film would be distributed with a PCA seal of approval. The MPPDA was given power to levy a $25,000 fine against any violator. But that was not all. The church demanded that Hollywood permanently withdraw from circulation films it viewed as “immoral” and that local theater owners be empowered to cancel any film currently in circulation if they judged it to be “immoral.”"

"(1) No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title."

"The comic-book medium, having come of age on the American cultural scene, must measure up to its responsibilities. Constantly improving techniques and higher standards go hand in hand with these responsibilities. To make a positive contribution to contemporary life, the industry must seek new areas for developing sound, wholesome entertainment. The people responsible for writing, drawing, printing, publishing, and selling comic books have done a commendable job in the past, and have been striving toward this goal. Their record of progress and continuing improvement compares favorably with other media in the communications industry. An outstanding example is the development of comic books as a unique and effective tool for instruction and education. Comic books have also made their contribution in the field of letters and criticism of contemporary life."

"Art enters intimately into the lives of human beings. Art can be morally good, lifting men to higher levels. <br This has been done thru good music, great painting, authentic fiction, poetry, drama. Art can be morally evil in its effects. This is the case clearly enough with unclean art, indecent books, suggestive drama. The effect on the lives of men and women is obvious."

"The motion pictures which are the most popular of modern arts for the masses, have their moral quality from the minds which produce them and from their effects on the moral lives and reactions of their audiences. This gives them a most important morality. (1) They reproduce the morality of the men who use the pictures as a medium for the expression of their ideas sand ideals. (2) They affect the moral standards of those who thru the screen take in these ideas and ideals. In the case of the motion pictures, this effect may be particularly emphasized because no art was so quick and so widespread an appeal to the masses. It has become in an incredibly short period, the art of the multitudes."

"(7) Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay, physical agony, the gory and gruesome crime shall be eliminated."

"(2) All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted."

"(3) All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated."

"Dancing (1) Dancing in general is recognized as an art and a beautiful form of expressing human emotion. (2) Obscene dances are those: (a) Which suggest or represent sexual actions, whether performed solo or with two or more; (b) Which are designed to excite an audience, to arouse passions, or to cause physical excitement. HENCE: Dances of the type known as "Kooch" or "Can-Can," since they violate decency in these two ways, are wrong. Dances with movement of the breasts, excessive body movement while the feet remain stationary, the so-called "belly dances" these dances are immoral, obscene, and hence altogether wrong."

"Obscenity is concerned with immorality, but has the additional connotation of being common, vulgar and coarse. (1) Obscenity in fact, that is, in spoken word, gesture, episode, plot, is against divine and human law, and hence altogether outside the range of subject matter or treatment. (2) Obscenity should not be suggested by gesture, manner, etc., (3) An obscene reference, even if it is expected to be understandable to only the more sophisticated part o the audience, should not be introduced. (4) Obscene language is treated as all obscenity."

"African-American artists has greatly enriched our quality of life and created one of our Nation's most treasured art forms. As universal and original expressions of the human experience, their body of work, both past and present, entertains, inspires, and thrills countless people around the world."

"The Black Artist's role in America is to aid in the destruction of America as he knows it. His role is to report and reflect so precisely the nature of the society, and of himself, in that society, that other men will be moved by the exactness of his rendering, and if they are black men, grow strong through this moving, having seen their own strength, and weakness, and if they are white men, tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

"One of the best of the Chinese Buddhist shrines is the Temple of the Sleeping Buddha, near the Summer Palace outside Peking; Fergusson called it “the finest architectural achievement in China.”"

"Meanwhile another influence was entering China, in the form of Buddhist theology and art. It made a home for itself first in Turkestan, and built there a civilization from which Stein and Pelliot have unearthed many tons of ruined statuary; some of it seems equal to Hindu Buddhist art at its best. The Chinese took over those Buddhist forms without much alteration, and produced Buddhas as fair as any in Gandhara or India."

"As Christianity transformed Mediterranean culture and art in the third and fourth centuries after Christ, so Buddhism, in the same centuries, effected a theological and esthetic revolution in the life of China. While Confucianism retained its political power, Buddhism, mingling with Taoism, became the dominating force in art, and brought to the Chinese a stimulating contact with Hindu motives, symbols, methods and forms. The greatest genius of the Chinese Buddhist school of painting was Ku K’ai-chih, a man of such unique and positive personality that a web of anecdote or legend has meshed him in."

"The greatest painter of the T’ang epoch, and, by common consent, of all the Far East, rose above distinctions of school, and belonged rather to the Buddhist tradition of Chinese art. Wu Tao-tze deserved his name—Wu, Master of the Tao or Way, for all those impressions and formless thoughts which Lao-tze and Chuang-tze had found too subtle for words seemed to flow naturally into line and color under his brush."

"Sculpture was not one of the major arts, not even a fine art, to the Chinese. By an act of rare modesty the Far East refused to class the human body under the rubric of beauty; its sculptors played a little with drapery, and used the figures of men—seldom of women—to study or represent certain types of consciousness; but they did not glorify the body. For the most part they confined their portraits of humanity to Buddhist saints and Taoist sages, ignoring the-athletes and courtesans who gave such inspiration to the artists of Greece. In the sculpture of China animals were preferred even to philosophers and saints."

"Is the Makapansgat pebble “art”? In modern times, many artists have created works critics universally consider art by removing objects from their normal contexts, altering them, and then labeling them. In 1917, for example, Marcel Duchamp chose a ceramic urinal, set it on its side, called it Fountain, and declared his “readymade” worthy of exhibition among more conventional artworks. But the artistic environment of the past century cannot be projected into the remote past. For art historians to classify as an “artwork” a found object such as the Makapansgat pebble, it must have been modified by human intervention beyond mere selection—and it was not. In fact, evidence indicates that, with few exceptions, it was not until three million years later, around 30,000 BCE, when large parts of northern Europe were still covered with glaciers during the Ice Age, that humans intentionally manufactured sculptures and paintings. Only then does the story of art through the ages really begin."

"The sky is now indelible ink, The branches reft asunder; But you and I we do not shrink; We love the lovely thunder."