Cartoon pop artist Chris Cooper, aka Coop, is renowned in music circles as the creator of album covers and posters for major rock bands. He is also a Satanist, drawing pictures of naked she-devils and succubi, and when student Michael Peroceschi posted a gallery of Coop drawings on his Geocities home page, Geocities turned the page off.
“I think anytime someone shuts down something that’s art, it’s censorship,” says Peroceschi. “It’s not like this was triple-X porn stars.”
Peroceschi’s gallery, featuring illustrations that Coop has created for bands like Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Lords of Acid, had been up for five months before it suddenly disappeared with no explanation on Tuesday. Emails from Coop’s agent and wife, Ruth Waytz, inquiring after its removal have gone unanswered.
No one at Geocities could comment on the removal of the page, or explain who removed it and why, but Mark Feldman, the company webmaster, said that it was probably taken down because someone had complained, and because it didn’t follow the standards set by the GeoCities guidelines.
“Our guidelines are clear – they say no nudity or porn of any kind,” Feldman says. “If the devils were in some sexual activities or nude, then it would be taken down.”
Geocities has grown in recent months to be one of the largest sites-cum-communities on the Web. Over 550,000 users have pages, free of charge, and the network is ad-supported. As such, Feldman explains, they have to be careful of their “commercial interests.”
But Waytz believes that the case of Coop is unclear – although his drawings depict nudity and sexual imagery, he is a nationally reknowned artist, featured by the ArtRock group, in many gallery shows (including one beginning next week at LA’s La Luz de Jesus gallery), and in culture magazines. The Coop gallery had been receiving 50 or 60 visitors a day, and Peroceschi hadn’t received any complaints about obscenity.
Even Feldman admits that the line between art and obscenity is vague: “Generally, I would assume that certain photographs or drawings would be accepted – a Renaissance picture for example…. Some of these are gray areas, and we try to use our best judgment.”
Meanwhile, the site has been mirrored on Peroceschi’s university page. While Peroceschi is reluctantly accepting Geocities’ decision, Waytz is taking her complaint to the Blue Ribbon censorship campaign. “I’m pissed because Geocities has this big plug about what a big loving community they are, and then they do this,” she says. “There are so many worse things out there.”
