Meanwhile the press and the police have decided the issue is about whether the photographs are art or pornography, thus excluding all other principles, such as decency. Licence or law, take your pick.

Art community defends naked teen photo exhibition.

The moment this story broke this headline (on the ABC site earlier today) was sure to follow. The police are taking a look at the legality of exhibiting naked photographs of children said to be aged thirteen or fourteen. A critic is cited: these photographs do not sexualise the children.

Maybe, maybe not – I haven’t seen them. But we notice once again, as with all such events that the critic (and someone described as an ‘art market analyst’) defend the photographs by making an interpretation – they don’t sexualise the children. In other contexts, you may be sure, these same authorities will make the argument that the interpretation of art is down to the spectator.

It’s not news that the visual arts ‘community’ makes self-contradictory arguments. What’s interesting is the ritual character of these events – people shout, slogans are exchanged, the art world sees the affair as further evidence for the doltishness of everybody not in the art world, right-thinking burghers see it as further evidence of moral decline. Business then continues as usual until the next arbitrary crisis.

The fixity points to an underlying script. Perhaps the concept of art, whether emptied of all meaning, as conservatives claim it now is, or vastly enlarged, as in the aesthetic of the late Robert Rauschenberg, still operates as a quasi-sacred concept. ‘Art’ liberates the artist and the spectator from the rules that govern other forms of exchange. Remember the case of Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ’ (the crucifix suspended in urine)? Desecration was of course the point of the piece – everyone got that – but when Christians actually objected to the desecration of their sacred icon they were treated with derision. The function of the word ‘art’ here is to license licence: we will do as we wish and an invisible barrier will protect us. Well it didn’t in the Serrano case, and I doubt it will in the present one.