Thursday 31 January 2008

Seduced!

This semester I am teaching a module entitled Controlling Creativity: the Censorship of Entertainment Products to our LLM Entertainment Law Students at the University of Westminster. As part of this we try and have various field trips and outings, previous years have seen us go on a trip to see Jerry Springer the Opera at the Cambridge Theatre for example. In addition we try and get some practical input from bodies such as the British Board of Film Classification and the Advertising Standards Authority who come and give presentations to our students. Students give presentations and write papers based on an area of specific interest to them, broadly framed by the idea of 'controlling creativity'. Over the years we have had some really innovative pieces from the students in many diverse areas.

This year we decided to go and see the Barbican exhibition 'Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now'. There are details on the Barbican site of coverage of the exhibition and also a link to a BBC 4 News review;
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=5625

As part of the feedback from this I asked the students to write their own reviews - these provided further proof of the value and use of contextual approaches to the teaching of law. One student began her review as follows;

"I’ve been reading a lot about this exhibition in the newspapers and was seriously considering to pay it a visit. Although I don’t go to art exhibitions very often, the combination of art and sex really appealed to me. However as time passed by, I never took any action to actually go to the Barbican. Therefore I was pleasantly surprised that last week Guy announced we were going to the exhibition and that tickets were paid for by the University. Such a great initiative and so appropriate for the module on censorship we are following at the moment.

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