"Because God Is Dead & Everything Is Sex”

Jane sees the painting. It is a pretty painting. “Why is there a penis on the painting? asks Jane. “Because God is dead and everything is sex,” says mummy.

New words: pretty, painting, penis.

This is how one of the stories from Miriam Elia’s sardonic tales of Mummy, Peter and Jane’s trip to an art gallery, reads. Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, her satirical ‘kidult’ book We Go To The Gallery, co-written by her brother Ezra, pokes fun at the popularly known Ladybird Peter and Jane series, a trade name under which Penguin published the books, as much as it satirizes the art world. Ending with ‘new words’ and illustrations in the classic style of the Penguin imprint, siblings Peter and Jane, accompanied by their mother, go on an exciting trip to an art gallery where they contemplate conceptual art, optimistically ask borderline-banal questions to which their mother answers with nihilistic art cliches. Rather tongue-in-cheek, mummy provides her children with harsh and hilarious reality checks as they come across empty rooms, endless waterfalls, paintings of vaginas and a dismembered rabbit.

“The jolly, colourful illustrations will enable the child to smoothly internalise all of the debilitating middle class self hatred contained in each artwork. New words on every page also help the child to identify the concepts, so that they may repeat them at dinner parties and impress educated guests,” reads ILoveMel’s witty description of the book.

As amused as readers were with the book, Penguin UK  wasn’t tickled by it, and subsequently sent the artist a fifteen page letter slamming a copyright infringement suit against Elia’s ‘adult content.’ “Penguin books are after my blood,” Elia wrote to Hyperallergic, in a joint statement with Ezra. She continues: “ ‘We Go to the Gallery’ is in danger. Penguin means to pulp it, to sue me, and to prevent it from ever entering the public realm again. They do so on the pretext that it pollutes the idyllic brand of Ladybird books, and that I have infringed copyright on images they own. Yet they are still to prove that they own any such copyright, and the Ladybird brand is so remote from my audience that no child stands in any danger of an accidental corruption. Their argument is now fundamentally moral, not legal, and as such is an act of senseless and repressive censorship. Neither am I the first artist that they have persecuted, on similar grounds.” Even Mark Donney, whose father was Chairman and Chief Executive of Penguin from 1969 to 1973, came to Elia’s defense in a supportive letter he sent her criticising Penguin the entire situation.

Taking advantage of a copyright loophole for parodies, Elia made the slightest alterations, swapped names from Peter and Jane to John and Susan and replaced the Ladybird logo with a dung beetle. This re-created publishing house has a hilarious, albeit imaginary, backstory in the ‘about us’ section. “ ‘Dung Beetle’ continue to produce high quality books and early learning tools covering a range of sensitive or difficult topics. Their key goal is simple: To embed core literacy and numeracy skills into the child’s first knowledge of evil and death. Est doctrina de stercore, from shit comes learning. For just as the humble dung beetle gathers faeces from the forest floor in which to lay its eggs, the child also lays ‘eggs of knowledge’ in the turd of its own mind.” Dung Beetle Books specified it’s three key learning principles in a press release for the relaunch of the art book -- “helping children to understand that there is nothing to understand. Ensuring the child’s own opinions match those of the arts elite and preparing young people for a lifetime of crippling uncertainty.”
After three-and-a-half months of letters going back and forth and thousands of pounds in lawyers fees, Elia decided to stop responding to Penguin’s threats, took pen to paper and reacted in the manner most natural in the situation--creating a satirical Ladybird book about the entire hoopla. The entire case is ironic since Penguin followed suit to unveil their own series of “Ladybird books for grown-ups.”

Elia sure did face the ‘wrath’ of Penguin for using the Ladybird-inspired format to satirize art and its relationship with consumerism, but it really shouldn’t stop her creations. In one of her stories itself she draws attention to Jeff Koon’s infamous and incredibly expensive dog sculptures that landed him with copyright infringement lawsuits as well, but this didn’t stop him from making artworks using already existing images. Need this be limited to the top dogs of the creative world? However, while the laws of copyrights do play a major disadvantage to the smaller artists and writers, they do, on the other hand, protect the artworks of others who depend on their work for a livelihood. 

Sure, we live in a world where there are songs sampling other songs, constant references are being made to different forms of arts in various other works, but at the end of the day, we still exist as a capitalist and consumerist society where the exchange and accumulation of money matters. The concepts of copyright and ownership may be becoming more fluid, but the work existing primarily as a source of income remains. There are several anti-copyright arguments to be made and vice-versa for its defense, and we’re not taking sides, especially when it comes to Elia’s subversive work that’s a spot-on parody of our consumerist nature and conceptual art.

We present to you below a selection of our favourites from We Go To The Gallery. Warning: may cause existential crisis and “a lifetime of crippling uncertainty.”

Visit Miriam Elia’s official website to know more about the artist and comedy writer and her works.