On curation and offence
It’s been nearly six months since I left freelance and headed back in-house to oversee WeTransfer’s new editorial platform.
There have been several challenges we have faced, but one thing that has come up in the months since we overhauled our curation (of the background images you see on WeTransfer) and began telling the stories behind the wallpapers (on our blog This Works) is the issue of offence.
I have been reminded of certain lessons I learned in the past, and seen them magnified given WeTransfer’s huge reach — around 88 million visits a month from every country you can think of.
These lessons are:
- People get offended by stuff more than you might imagine.
- It’s sometimes very difficult to anticipate which images/projects/articles will rub people up the wrong way.
- As an editor you have to draw a line somewhere and trust your own judgement.
On average I am alerted to a complaint about an image every couple of days. Some of these were maybe predictable — a girl in a bikini offended some conservative sensibilities for example.
But this issue wasn’t confined to the half-naked female form. A recent collaboration with Rankin drew some flak over an older gent enjoying the beach in his Speedos, and a young topless guy posing on the promenade. For one user, this was “a half naked man grabbing his penis.”
The problem here is where does this stop. We have always had a very strict “no nudity” policy for the platform. Let’s imagine we extend this to include women in bikinis, and perhaps, from that, in any clothes that may be considered skimpy or provocative by someone, somewhere, or anyone, anywhere. We should add half-naked men too, to be consistent. But in some cultures heads should be covered up. In others, the bottoms of the feet is an absolute no-no. Ishicascadiggaphobia is the fear of elbows, so these should be avoided too, to be on the safe side.
Maybe we just say no people. That way we avoid all these pitfalls. We outrage and offend nobody.
Here’s another example. A few weeks ago we ran a series of Chip Clark’s photos which he took in the archives of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. At no stage did I consider these might be problematic, but I had forgotten that people are very quick to voice concern over anything that might resemble animal cruelty (which, of course, is in itself a good thing).
One of Chip’s pictures showed a curator in the museum’s birds department, surrounded by open storage drawers filled with preserved parrots. The complaints came quickly and consistently. Again and again I explained to people that this wasn’t some back-room bird-stuffing operation; it was one of the leading museums in the world with the highest possible conservation standards. Some people listened, some people didn’t. Some people cared about our explanation, some people didn’t.
So let’s say now we remove animals. After all, in some religions pigs are considered dirty. Some people don’t like cats. Now it’s no artwork that features animals or people. And our options as curators have been severely hampered.
I don’t for a second dismiss people’s right to be offended by something we run, or their right to complain to us about something they don’t like. I think that anyone in our position should be willing and able to explain the choices we have made.
If you can’t explain why you have chosen to showcase a particular piece of work, that doesn’t bode well for your curation as a whole. But just because someone is offended by something, that doesn’t mean the automatic response should be for us to remove it.
We do occasionally take things down. There was one image that various people felt promoted an unhealthy body image (it featured a model with an extremely skinny shoulder). After multiple complaints, we decided to remove it. We agreed in this instance that the image was problematic and felt we had a responsibility not to promote it to a wider audience.
So we do listen and we will admit if we have made a mistake. We don’t in any way set out to provoke people or to be controversial. We believe sometimes art should be challenging, but equally we are aware the relationship we have with our users is not exactly the same as a publisher and their readers.
But I do think it’s important we don’t cave in at the first murmurings of dissent. The offended few can often be much noisier than the engaged many. And it wouldn’t be right, as an organisation that believes in the power of creativity and works to promote and empower creatives around the world, if we failed to back our own decisions, or the work we want to support.
