Are there limits to artistic license?
| 21:20 UK time, Friday, 30 July 2010
The author of the international bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul is in trouble. Asne Seierstad's book tells the story of an Afghan family's life in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. But one of the family members has successfully sued the author for The case has got people around the world talking about the limits of artistic license. So is this a slap in the face for freedom of expression?
The book contains tales of the family's sex lives and "forbidden loves" which the family say has left them feeling "humiliated". Seierstad spent five months with the family and Conor Foley argues that she's
she does not seem to have understood the absolute centrality of the concepts of "hospitality" and "namos" (literally the "purity, virtuousness, and nobleness of the female members of the family") to Afghan society. The idea that you could accept someone's hospitality and then spy on them to violate their namos is completely shocking
But Jonathan Heawood disagrees, he says this sets a for freedom of expression
What would it mean for literature if all characters based on real people were removed from the record? No Buck Mulligan in Ulysses; no Casaubon in Middlemarch...Literature does not respect the boundary between public and private; in fact, it is all about overstepping that mark.
Just last week a similar case came up in the U.S. The late painter Larry Rivers made films of his daughters going through puberty. The films now belong to Larry Rivers Foundation, but one of the daughters is asking for them back because they bring up for her. The foundation haven't returned them yet because they say their job is to protect the art. Alix McKenna concedes the tapes may have artistic value, but says they should be returned
So what are the limits of artistic license? Does freedom of expression trump personal sensitivities? Or is some art unjustifiably intrusive?
