A Prize for Raif Badawi

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

BREAKING NEWS: Raif Badawi was named on Tuesday as the International Writer of Courage and PEN Pinter Prize co-recipient for 2015 by English PEN, the human rights and freedom of expression organization. The poet James Fenton was named the winner in June, but the tradition has been that the winner select a co-winner. Fenton selected Raif Badawi.
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Down with Renoir!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Yesterday at noon, protesters began to chant: “Rosy cheeks are for clowns / Do your job, take them down.” Another: “God hates Renoir! God hates Renoir!” The number of people attending the protest in front of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts numbered in the middle-to-high single digits, according to reports.

Max Geller, a political organizer, hates Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the Impressionist painter who died in 1919 and never used anything but pastels in any of his several many famous and gigantic works. If one could type a sentence that used air quotes and then took them away and then replaced them again, one might perhaps begin to convey a sense of how completely almost serious and almost mocking and yet earnestly this hatred is felt.

Protest is important. In a free country, one ought to be able to protest anything and everything. This happens to be a free country, and the display of Renoir’s frenetically-dabbed pastel pastorals is as good an object of protest as many. (Not “any,” but many.) Two of his works have fetched more than $70 million at auction in the last quarter-century, so the received perceived wisdom in both the art world and the world world is that Renoir’s many giant works are good and valuable.
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More Saudi Youths Sentenced to Die

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What is known is that as of today, October 19, ‪Ali Mohammed al-Nimr, a 20-year-old Saudi sentenced to death by beheading, has not been beheaded. His body has not been crucified and then displayed, which is also a horrifying part of his sentence. Because corporal and capital sentences are usually carried out on Fridays—after public prayers—dread accompanies the approach of each Friday for friends and family of those sentenced, and then with the absence of any word from Ali’s family, a tense non-relief follows. But he is not the only under-age prisoner in Saudi Arabia who has been sentenced to death by beheading.

The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights (ESOHR) has been publicizing three stories: Ali al-Nimr’s and those of Dawood Hussain Almarhoon and Abedallah al-Zaher. All three were arrested before they were 18 years of age, all three have been held in prison since the arrests (each young man was arrested in 2012), and all three have been almost certainly tortured.
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