Art Is Fine, But Not the Sexy Kine by Scott Ostler
SF Chronicle - April 27, 2000
Cowabunga, so to speak, there's an art censorship story brewing in the wine country.
The artist is Catherine Anderson, and she's big on cows. That's not her only subject, but she paints a lot of cows. All of them naked.
Bare-naked cows have helped make Anderson famous. Her paintings hang in prestigious collections, galleries and museums all over the country.
But this is about where her paintings will not hang: in The Lodge at Sonoma.
The Lodge at Sonoma, due to open this fall, is a four-star resort that is part of Renaissance Hotels and Resorts, which is a division of Marriott.
The Lodge people are busy buying the work of local artists. Anderson is a local artist. The Lodge first considered buying her painting of a row of cows in a field, but someone upstairs decided the painting was . . . well, it just wasn't, you know, right. There were too many bovine back porches involved.
The hotel decided it wanted instead Anderson's painting of some baby cows, faces forward. But that painting was sold, so Anderson brought the hotel people a third work titled ``Fresh Air'' (see picture).
A hotel representative accepted the painting and gave Anderson a check.
But soon afterward, the woman phoned Anderson and told her that the painting could not be hung at the hotel because one of the cows is in a “provocative position.”
Anderson was stunned and flummoxed. She had never thought of her paintings as cow porn.
Anderson's reply was, basically: “Provocative? Provocative!?”
Sorry, said the hotel woman, we really want to hang your work, but not this one. We want to swap.
A representative for whoever makes final art decisions for the hotel told me, “We want to be careful not to have paintings that might be construed as even slightly, remotely offensive to anyone.”
She also told me, “The Lodge has guidelines for the artwork. One of the guidelines is no animals in provocative positions.”
Now there's a hotel that covers its, uh, bases. Anderson says: “It's sick.”
The artist says she absolutely will not swap paintings. Her artistic sensibility has been offended. She will not be cowed, so to speak. She will not kowtow to the Lodge.
Now the hotel has a bigger problem. The cows Anderson painted are still right there in Sonoma, moseying around their pastures, naked, ready to do to Lodge guests what cows do: Mooooon.
WEIRDNUZ.644 (News of the Weird, June 9, 2000)
by Chuck Shepherd
Minneapolis Star Tribune
According to an April San Francisco Chronicle feature, a painting by local artist Catherine Anderson had been accepted for hanging, then rejected, by the fancy Lodge at Sonoma resort set to open later this year. Anderson specializes in paintings of cows, but the Lodge declined her first piece because the cows in the field included too many posteriors, and also declined a substitute because one cow was in what a Lodge representative allegedly said was a "provocative position." [San Francisco Chronicle, 4-27-00]
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