Art News

Perennial hindu whinger Rajan Zed is calling on Rome and Paris museums to censor an iconic Barbie doll as goddess Kali in their Barbie exhibitions, claiming it to be highly inappropriate. Zed said it trivialized the highly revered deity of Hinduism.

Barbie The Icon exhibition at Museo delle Culture in Milan, which reportedly carried an Argentinean artists' created Barbie portrayed as goddess Kali with a dagger and plate carrying a severed head, is ending on March 13. It was said to be moving to Complesso del Vittoriano gallery in Il Vittoriano monument in Rome (April 15 to October 30) and Musee des Arts decoratifs in Paris (till September 18).

Zed claimed that reimagining Hindu scriptures and deities for commercial or other agenda was not okay as it hurt the feelings of devotees. Goddess Kali and other Hindu deities were meant to be worshipped in temples and home shrines and not meant to be reduced to a Barbie character.

Rajan Zed repeated his ludicrous claim that Hindus were for free speech as much as anybody else if not more ...BUT... faith was something sacred and attempts at belittling it hurt the devotees. Artists should be more sensitive while handling faith related subjects, Zed added.

A judge at the French Supreme Court has ruled that Facebook is accountable to French law.

The ruling was made after a teacher sued the website for banning an image that he had posted of Courbet's The Origin of the World which contravened Facebook's censorship rules on nudity. The court ruled that the case comes under its jurisdiction and it is now due to be heard by a civil court in France on 21 May.

Facebook's lawyers had argued that all users agreed to use the courts in California for litigation when they joined the site. Le Journal des Arts said that the judge called this clause abusive , while the teacher's lawyer noted that if it were enforced, none of France's 22 million Facebook users would have recourse to French legal jurisdiction in the event of a dispute .

Facebook has also announced a change to its censorship rules to permit Photographs of paintings, sculptures and other art that depicts nude figures .

Lego will no longer ask for thematic purpose of bricks it sells after it was international shamed for censoring Chinese artist Ai WeiWei.

Lego has performed a U-turn on its bulk orders policy after it was engulfed in controversy when it refused an order from the artist. Ai accused the company of an act of censorship and discrimination when it refused to sell him a bulk order last October.

Lego said at the time that its censorship policy was to block requests that it believed would be used for political purposes.

The decision sparked a wave of online criticism and led to WeiWei setting up Lego collection points across the world. The results of the project are now on show in the Letgo Room (2015) at the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia.

Lego said in a statement on its website that the censorship policy has been dropped but exhibitors of works featuring lego will now be now be asked to make it clear - if they intend to display their Lego creations in public - that the Lego Group does not support or endorse the specific projects,

Mr Ai welcomed the decision, tweeting nice move on his official account with the hashtag freedomofexpression .

An exhibition about gender inequality in China has been shut down by the authorities. The show, entitled Jian, Rape: Gender Violence Cultural Codes , was booked to open at Ginkgo Space, a commercial gallery in Beijing. Artist Cui Guangxia had organised the exhibition as a response to the United Nations call for men to engage with the issue of women's rights.

The closure by local officials could be a result of sensitivity to any open discussion of human rights in China, says Cui, or to the directness of the show's title, and the explicit nature of many of the works it contained. Or it could be because Cui is one of more than a dozen Chinese artists arrested last year for voicing support for the democracy protests in Hong Kong. Or it could be a combination of all these factors.

The leading Chinese feminist artist Xiao Lu says the censored exhibition, which was to include the work of 32 female and 32 male artists, would have been the first show in China to address the issue of gender equality.

A village's 6ft-tall Muslim angel has been censored by vandals after threats that the artwork was not in keeping with Christmas.

Artist Penelope Walford used a store mannequin and a curtain to make the angel, which was dressed in a burqa.

She said she was inspired by her fear of rising Islamophobia after the Paris terror attacks and the UK's decision for air strikes against Islamic State .

Walford displayed her work as part of the St Helens Village of Angels event, Isle of Wight. She said:

She had been up a few days when I had a call saying she should be taken down because people had been talking about the 'burqa-clad angel'. They said it was not in the spirit of Christmas and there was no place for a Muslim angel in a Christian event. One chap was threatening to behead it and another said he was going to rip her burqa off.