War, Art and the Internet

Abstract

The internet facilitates outrage, encourages debate, and ultimately accommodates balanced response. It allows for knowledge to be acquired and then shaped into shared meanings and understandings. Even if the digital record of the mainstream media is perhaps the more informed and balanced, the arguably greater significance of the internet - content aside - lies in its exemplification of the value of free communication. This argument is explored in the context of two 1996 paintings by contemporary Canadian painter Gertrude Kearns. The works were the subject of controversy when they went on display at the new Canadian War Museum, which opened on 5 May 2005. While Kearns’s works had previously been reproduced in a newspaper and a journal, they had not been exhibited in public before. The two compositions portray Master Corporal Clayton Matchee and Private Kyle Brown, the Canadian soldiers responsible for the 1993 murder of Shidane Arone, a Somali youth.