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🎪 general art-related public disturbances
(Part 1)
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1. Innocence of Muslims
Two versions of the 14-minute video were uploaded to YouTube in July 2012, under the titles The Real Life of Muhammad and Muhammad Movie Trailer.[5] Videos dubbed in Arabic were uploaded during early September 2012.[6] Anti-Islamic content had been added in post-production by dubbing, without the actors' knowledge.[7]

What was perceived as denigration of the Islamic prophet Muhammad resulted in demonstrations and violent protests against the video to break out on September 11 in Egypt and spread to other Arab and Muslim nations and to some western countries. The protests led to hundreds of injuries and over 50 deaths.[8][9][10][11] Fatwas calling for the harm of the video's participants were issued and Pakistani government minister Bashir Ahmad Bilour offered a bounty for the killing of Nakoula, the producer.[12][13][14][15] The film has sparked debates about freedom of speech and Internet censorship.[16]

2. L'Age d'Or
A 1930 French surrealist satirical comedy film directed by Luis Buñuel about the insanities of modern life, the hypocrisy of the sexual mores of bourgeois society, and the value system of the Catholic Church. The screenplay is by Salvador Dalí and Buñuel.[1]

Later, on 3 December 1930, the great popular success of the film provoked attacks by the right-wing Ligue des Patriotes (League of Patriots), whose angry viewers took umbrage at the visual statements made by Buñuel and Dalí. The reactionary French Patriots interrupted the screening by throwing ink at the cinema screen and assaulting viewers who opposed them. They then went to the lobby and destroyed art works by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy, and others. On 10 December 1930, the Prefect of Police of Paris, Jean Chiappe, arranged to have the film banned from further public exhibition after the Board of Censors re-reviewed the film.[2]. A contemporary right-wing Spanish newspaper published a condemnation of the film and of Buñuel and Dalí, which described the content of the film as "...the most repulsive corruption of our age ... the new poison which Judaism, Masonry, and rabid, revolutionary sectarianism want to use in order to corrupt the people".[4]

3. The Birth of a Nation
1915 drama film. Its plot, part fiction and part history, [chronicles] the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and the relationship of two families in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras over the course of several years—the pro-Union (Northern) Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy (Southern) Camerons. In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

[It] portrayed black men (many played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women. It presented the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a heroic force.[13][14] There were widespread black protests against The Birth of a Nation, such as in Boston, while thousands of white Bostonians flocked to see the film.[15] The NAACP spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to ban the film.[15]

4. Dancer in a Café
A large [Cubism-influenced] oil painting created in 1912 by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). Despite Metzinger's conceptualism of Cubist painting—the reflexive function of complex geometry, juxtaposed multiple perspectives, planar fragmentation suggesting motion and rhythmic play with various symmetry types—there does manifest itself in Danseuse a certain spatial depth or perspective reminiscent of the optical illusion of space of the Renaissance.

The Cubist contribution to the 1912 Salon d'Automne created a controversy in the Municipal Council of Paris, leading to a debate in the Chambre des Députés about the use of public funds to provide the venue for such 'barbaric' art. The Cubists were defended by the Socialist deputy, Marcel Sembat.[1][2][3]

5. Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
A large oil on canvas painting by Édouard Manet created in 1862 and 1863.


One interpretation of the work is that it depicts the rampant prostitution present at that time in the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on the western outskirts of Paris. This prostitution was common knowledge in Paris, but was considered a taboo subject unsuitable for a painting.[14]

6. Ubu Roi
A 1896 play by Alfred Jarry. It is a precursor to Dada, Surrealism and the Theatre of the Absurd. It is the first of three stylised burlesques in which Jarry satirises power, greed, and their evil practices—in particular the propensity of the complacent bourgeoisie to abuse the authority engendered by success.


It [was] considered a wild, bizarre and comic play, significant for the way it overturns cultural rules, norms, and conventions. At the end of the performance a riot broke out, an incident which has since become "a stock element of Jarry biographia".[7] After this, Ubu Roi was outlawed from the stage, and Jarry moved it to a puppet theatre.

7. Robert E. Lee Monument (Charlottesville, Virginia)
[An] outdoor bronze equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveller. Commissioned in 1917 and dedicated in 1924, it is located in Charlottesville, Virginia's Market Street Park (formerly Emancipation Park, and before that Lee Park) in the Charlottesville and Albemarle County Courthouse Historic District. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.[1]


On May 13, 2017, Richard B. Spencer led a torch-lit rally in Lee Park in protest of the Charlottesville town council's decision to remove and sell the statue and chanted "Jews will not replace us" and "Russia is our friend".[15][16][17][18] Sometime overnight between Friday July 7 and Saturday July 8, 2017, the statue was vandalized by being daubed in red paint.[13] It had been vandalized before; in June 2016 the pedestal was spray painted with the words "Black Lives Matter".[6]Charlottesville's vice mayor Wes Bellamy called on Charlottesville City Council to remove the statue and rename Lee Park. He said that the statue's presence "disrespected" parts of the community, and that he had "spoken with several different people who have said they have refused to step foot [sic] in to that park because of what that statue and the name of that park represents. And we can't have that in the city of Charlottesville."[4]

8. Family Quarrels
A comic opera in three acts with libretto by Thomas Dibdin, and music principally by William Reeve.

In the course of the action, Proteus disguises himself at one point as ‘Aaron the Jew’, and his song in this character recounts Aaron’s problems in courting Miss Levi, Miss Rachel and Miss Moses: this provoked demonstrations, including cat-calls, from Jews in the audience.[2] Some historians have claimed that Jews in the audience objected to the reference in the song to "three Jewish whores"[6] or even that the performance was " a deliberate attempt [by Dibdin] to please the government...to deflect attention away from the hardship, high taxation and repression...in Britain during the French revolutionary wars." The music historian David Conway [however] attributes the disturbances to the use, in the song's coda, of the melody and rhythm of the synagogue Kaddish prayer. He adds "this musical parody can in fact only have been inserted by Braham himself", as Braham was Jewish and had begun his career as a meshorrer (treble) in London's Great Synagogue. Conway comments that the use of this sacred melody "may suggest why the Jews in the gallery (who were perhaps more regularly in attendance at synagogue) were more incensed than the gentrified Jews in the boxes, as was reported by the Morning Chronicle",[9] and notes that the song "is the very first presentation I have discovered of genuine Jewish synagogue music in the context of Gentile stage entertainment."[10] Dibdin's autobiography, in a chapter entitled "And the Twelve Tribes Waxed Wroth", indicates that he included the song exactly in the hope of creating some sensational publicity.[11]

9. The Playboy of the Western World
A 1907 play written by Irish playwright John Millington Synge [about] Christy Mahon, a young man running away from his farm, claiming he killed his father.

Riots occurred in January 1907 during and following the opening performance of the play. The riots were stirred up by Irish nationalists and republicans who viewed the contents of the play as an offence to public morals and an insult against Ireland. The riots took place in Dublin, spreading out from the Abbey Theatre and finally being quelled by the actions of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

10. Olympia
A 1865 painting by Édouard Manet, In part, the painting was inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534), which in turn derives from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510). The Titian has two fully clothed women, presumably servants, in the background.


Though Manet's The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) sparked controversy in 1863, his Olympia stirred an even bigger uproar when it was first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. Conservatives condemned the work as "immoral" and "vulgar."[1] Journalist Antonin Proust later recalled, "If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only because of the precautions that were taken by the administration." Black feminists have rejected his reading and argue that it is not for artistic convention that Manet included Laure but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty and "inevitably reformulates the Cartesian perspectival logic that allows whiteness to function as the only subject of consideration".[15] As T. J. Clark recounts of a friend’s disbelief in the revised 1990 version of The Painting of Modern Life: “you’ve written about the white woman on the bed for fifty pages and more, and hardly mentioned the black woman alongside her.”[12] In Lorraine O' Grady's essay titled "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity",[16] she asserts, "Olympia's maid, like all other 'peripheral Negroes'", is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery. O'Grady points out that we know she represents 'Jezebel and Mammy' "and best of all, she is not a real person...", rather she is object to the objectified and excluded from sexual difference according to Freudian theory.[16] While Olympia looks directly at the viewer, her maid, too, is looking back.[17] In her essay "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and Their Homegirls: Developing an Oppositional Gaze toward the Images of Black Women", Catherine West concludes that by claiming an oppositional gaze we can identify, criticize, resist and transform these and other oppressive images of Black women.[18]

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🎼 music-related public disturbances
(Part 1)
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Notable instances of classical music concerts disruptions, often at the premiere of a new work or production: