Art Exhibit Plans to Show Celebrities' Hacked Photos

Florida gallery insists it's about art, not exploitation
By Arden Dier,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 5, 2014 10:25 AM CDT
Art Exhibit Plans to Show Celebrities' Hacked Photos
Kate Upton attends the premiere of "The Other Woman" hosted by The Cinema Society and Bobbi Brown, Thursday, April 24, 2014, in New York.   (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

This exhibit isn't likely to get much A-list approval: Florida's Cory Allen Contemporary Art Showroom plans to include some of the recent hacked nude photos of celebrities as part of an art show titled "No Delete." The St. Petersburg gallery tells Fox News that the October show is "about invasion of privacy" and "has been in the works for about two years now." After photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, and others leaked, Los Angeles artist XVALA decided to add them to his work, the gallery explains. E! reports the collection also will include intimate and nude images of celebrities taken from Google over a seven-year period, printed "life-size and unaltered."

"In today's culture, everybody wants to know everything about everybody," says XVALA in a statement. "An individual's privacy has become everyone else's business." The gallery is using a this-is-art rationale to defend the piece and say it's within the law, but MTV sounds skeptical it will happen considering that the photos are now part of an FBI investigation and celebs are promising to prosecute those who share them. It also notes that XVALA's decision to show the exhibit in Florida rather than his native state "might have something to do with the fact that in California, posting nude photos without consent and with the intention of causing distress is actually against the law." (More Jennifer Lawrence stories.)

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