Nazi Gnomes and censorship

A german artist, Ottmar Hoerl, has created a series of garden gnomes that display nazi-era symbols. Now he is being investigated for contravening German law that criminalises the depiction of symbols and gestures such as the nazi swastika and the sieg-heil salute.

Hoerl reportedly says he is lampooning the concept of the master race. A report on the BBC website reports that the ironic message was well received when the gnomes were exhibited in Belgium.

What I find disturbing about this story is that the works are subject to censorship and they were anonymously reported to German police. That this smacks of an authoritarian regime, and seems to reify the problem suggests that these policies and attitudes present a threat to democratic political process and human rights that was exemplified by the NDAP(nazis). That this might re-open a debate as to the nature of the German geist also might give other nations a chance to look at their own dark hearts.

Of course, how neo-Nazis would utilise a relaxation of censorship offers it's own problems. Perhaps reminding them how they look small and pompous might help- and that might require garden gnomes.

trepassing in art spaces

A recent essay by David Myers, a sociologist who studies MMOGs( online games like World of Warcraft) has raised a flurry of controversy about the ethics of his research. What he attempted to do was play a character," Twixt" who would singlemindedly use tactics allowed by the game but frowned upon by most players.

He obviously didn't reveal to those he played against that he wanted to see what happened when he breached the socially normative rules of the online community involved. Responses online included verbal abuse and death threats.

In considering the ethics of this research, it seems that one notion has not been explicitly discussed. That notion is that the community of players do not consider the game as a virtual space, but rather another space like one's living room, or a public park. The dichotomy between Myer's using the game as he would as a real space rather than a laboratory, but then standing back in his defense of his methods, as if he hadn't really gone out into the real world strikes me as an important paradox. Not in so much as he did not acknowledge this but in that different spaces can be felt contrived by some - "It's just a game", "it's just an art installation" - while others form a community heavily invested in the space in question and so perceive their digital space as authentic.

What is the difference between a digital space and an art installation? Is the different purely socially constructed, with those emotionally invested saying yes, it is our space, and other's having more equivocal relationships to the given space?

Are online games more real than gallery installations? More people play games than visit galleries, and when people stop visiting a space, then in Lefebvrian terms, it ceases to be a space. So does one vote, one visit activate a space to where a researcher must exact the same care as say doing ethnographic research in a livingroom?